A Second Chance for Redemption
by Fusionmix
Summary: Half a century after the Bad Ending, the world still stands. This is the story of a family caught between an insane evil overlord, the rebels out to kill him, and a broken robot who will not deviate from his purpose of ending the war nobody knows exists.
1. All About Yesterday

**First Written April 05, 2007. **

Holy crap. This fic is four years old now. Not even proper novel length and desperately juvenile, it's nevertheless taken me four years to write what I have thus far. It's been an experiment for me, as this fic marks a lot of firsts: first story I've written to crest 50k words (and possibly reach 100k someday if it's only halfway through the plot as I fear), first to feature a female primary protagonist, first relationships beyond friendship between characters, and so on.

I was fourteen when I began posting this, but much younger when I first plotted out an early outline of sorts on three sheets of mangled yellow college-ruled notebook paper. In the time that stretches between now and then, I like to imagine that the stylistic flow and structure of my storytelling has evolved. But reading over my older work from my youngest days of writing, it's a little disconcerting to see those are the only thing that have changed. The general plot remains the same – people do something and save the world. There is a great deal of doing, and almost no meaning behind it. I can write words and words and words and they may be beautiful, but they will never speak to anyone. And that is all right with me. I am not Orson Scott Card or John Knowles or Terry Pratchett or any of my other idols of authorship.

I am Fusionmix, and this is a semi-original fiction which, in later chapters, involves elements of Daisuke Amaya's freeware masterwork Cave Story. This is not the next Great American Novel. It's a silly story about a girl who is unlikeable and foolish at times for reasons I will dismiss by saying she is human, rather than admitting to myself that I simply did not know how to write believable and likeable female characters when I began. It's an occasionally pretentious story with excerpts from crappy songs at the beginnings of chapters because I can't bear to remove them out of nostalgia. It's a goofy fanfic I hope reads well and conforms when applicable to the laws of English.

Welcome to the world of ASCfR. Please keep your hands, feet, and related limbs inside the vehicle at all times. Relax, and enjoy your ride.

All lyric excerpts are property of bands I used to listen to or still listen to and am in denial about liking.

* * *

_A Second Chance for Redemption_

_Chapter 1_

†††

_I woke up in a dream today, to the cold of the static,  
Put my cold feet on the floor.  
Forgot all about yesterday, remembering,  
I'm pretending to be who I'm not anymore…_

Merely after seeing a single match, she loathed the Games, mind and gut rebelling against every single aspect of that cruel pretense of a sport. Even a year hence, guttural snarls, issued from between hooked fangs and twisted mandibles and physically impossible structures of biological jokery had never quite released their hold and gone onward into the safe haven of distant memory. In her mind, the snarl-sounds mingled equally with the hoarse, terrorized grunts and screams of the same creatures—maybe those who were maybe not as strong, not as resolute as others; those who spilled fresh blood across brownish-crimson stained metal tiles, and whose entrails were trampled by the oncoming hordes of their less-frightened comrades. And then, not too often, but it did happen, would come amidst the mayhem the broken cry of a Gladiator, when he would be swatted to the ground and waves of monsters washed over him.

Worst of all was the crowd, massive, leering, and roaring its approval as a favorite Gladiator tore through the ranks of his foes, or jeering raucously as he was pulled down and savaged. Then the alarms would howl, and the little thrusters on the beaten warrior's suit would kick in, and lift his half-alive armored frame out of the reach of the beasts, over the edge of the pit to a waiting stretcher. If the booth Controllers ensured that his jets activated and he was pulled from the arena in the time, he would survive, and return to bathe new cybernetic bone and muscle in spurts of thick, red blood.

Yes, she did hate the Games, strong words be damned. Let the world know that Tera hated watching a lone human butcher dim-witted creatures shipped in from whatever twisted laboratories could stand to create such pathetic excuses for life. Tera Ankiel had avoided the underground arena of her hometown in Texas for a year since she had gone, for the first and last time, with a group of loud-laughing companions to see a match live. Her brother followed the leagues of Gladiators—their rivalries and friendships and elaborately silly callsigns that set them apart from their other faceless armored fellows—so she naturally caught several bouts on television. The Controllers were fast and accurate. Blood was spilled, but nobody died.

So it was her own debatable luck that in this battle, the gladiator was killed.

She remembered every gruesome detail with bitter-bold clearness, sharp, cold, and more than anything, precise. She'd forgotten how to breathe sometime around when she first saw the emergency jets on his suit ignite, watched his limp form jerk from the maw of one of the larger beasts, one arm twisted in an unnatural way, helmet bashed in completely on the left side, armor shredded away at the distended hip. Her friends did not mock her reaction, rather, they comforted her, for it had been their first time as well to see one of the gladiators be so badly mangled, but they assured her that he would probably live. In fact, in a moment of exceedingly bad sympathetic judgment they took her to see him, forcing their way through the ring of murmuring fans and members of the crowd as the medics loaded him onto a stretcher and, after fumbling with upper-body armor plates, plugged various needles, pumping pain-relief drugs, into his neck.

She could remember the dull clank of metal armor as those triangular two-inch-thick pieces of bronze-gold protection hit the concrete, tossed there among the peanut and sunflower shells. Torn completely through even in some of the bulkiest spots, the armor lay for the passing sun to beam glare off into her Tera's eyes.

None of the ghostly white-clothed men reached for the thick snakes den of life support cables; no gloved hands extended towards the oxygen mask. The near-silence of the medical team meant disaster, and as one of them shrugged, and turn to leave, the group of observers ceased their whispering.

A few of the older men took off their hats, and shut their eyes, but the vast majority of the once rambunctious onlookers to the fight lost their gruesome interest and flitted away, blurry and out of focus.

The Gladiator seemed too young, probably only eighteen or so, with a thick shock of black hair, now crusted and matted with sweat and blood. His one intact eye flitted about aimlessly, darting to and fro in its socket like a thing possessed, before lighting on her. A smile flickered across his swollen, bruised face, jerkily pulling up his mouth at the corners, bloodstained lips trembling with the effort. "…H-hey-y-y…" was all he forced out, in one painful, gurgling croak.

The eye remained fixed on her, the grin ceased to quiver and remained fixed for a few seconds until it melted back, in sections, relaxing bit by bit by bit. A dark trickle welled over his lower molars, over his sagging lip...

The eye, bloodshot brown, had just begun to list when Tera turned, blindly palmed a person out of her way, and ran.

* * *

"So are you coming or not?" Alisa's voice seemed harsh and distorted as it issued from Tera's tinny phone speakers.

"'Lisa, I can't." A lame excuse; she knew that Alisa would see it as such, and win out in the end. "I'm…busy, that's all."

Alisa's voice was now harsh, distorted, _and_ a little reproachful. "Girl, don't even _try_ to tell me that you're busy. Or did you find somebody yet? If you did, we can get an extra ticket."

Apparently, the only kind of 'busy' that Alisa recognized as being valid was a date, but that insult stung. Fine. It had been a year, she was a big girl of seventeen now, and she could cope with watching mindless brutality and slaughter for a few hours and sitting in an uncomfortable plastic seat that jabbed in all the wrong places and stuck to her legs when she tried to stand up. "You win, Alisa," she said reluctantly, letting her sigh out audibly, more for Alisa's satisfaction than her own comfort.

"Is he hot? What's his name?" Alisa's voice carried evil, evil glee. "Or her name, if..."

Tera thumped her head onto the table to conceal an embarrassed flush. "Ok, fine, what time is it?"

"Ten. We'll pick you up. Buh-bye!" Click, and the steady beep…beep…beep. Tera could almost picture Alisa's sickeningly happy little wave.

"If you would like to make a call," said the phone, "please hang up and try again!"

Tera flipped her phone into sleep mode and slid it into her pocket like one in a trance, or deep thought. Hanging up. That had the potential to be profound. Why not, say, hang up past apprehension, take a step out, and try again? That was all she could do now, put on a brave face and go to the Games, or make up some hopelessly inadequate excuse of helping her brother, and have Alisa and Anzl and the rest laugh their little hearts out about what a cowardly, closed-minded twit she was.

Joy.

* * *

On the way up the street towards where she had left her bike, she was met by Nemo, the Ankiel family's Personal Household Assistance Droid, or PHAD. "Hello, Miss Tera. Can I be of assistance?"

Tera felt like ignoring him, but since he was a robot, he would probably follow her and continue to ask the same question like a blue-plated mental retard. Which, Tera had to remind herself, due to the limits of robotics technology, he was. "No, Nemo, you can't."

"Is Miss Tera in adequate emotional condition?"

"Yes, Nemo, I'm fine. I'm going home." A sudden thought piqued her curiosity; she turned away from her bike to face him. "What are you doing downtown?"

Nemo's inner workings whirred briefly, before he answered, "I am running an errand for your mother. May I ask what was your assignment?"

Tera couldn't help a smile at his behavior. Whoever had been in charge of coding the PHADs had not been much in the way of an innovator. The little bots talked and spoke like something out of an Asimov novel. "I was at the library, studying for my biology test that comes when school starts. Remember? I told you before I left."

"I am sorry to have forgotten, Miss Tera. I should have searched my memory banks more thoroughly before bothering you with a question to which I already possessed the answer." Although his metal face could only display emotion to a very limited degree, his voice could make up for this, and Tera felt a rush of sympathy for her little iron brother.

"It's alright. I was mumbling this morning, I can't blame you for mishearing. Don't beat yourself up over it."

Nemo could cock his head to the side, and he did now. "Beat myself up? I do not understand."

"Stop thinking about it," Tera defined.

The robot nodded, and looked off down the road. "Will you have a rendezvous with your associates tonight, Miss Tera? According to your mother, you are 'free to go wherever if you would like', she has no task for you to perform tonight."

Tera shut her eyes and mounted her bike, flicking a strand of straw-colored hair out of her face, saying as she did so, "I'm going with Alisa to the Games at ten. I'll tell her myself though."

Nemo pulled the closest thing to a frown that his blue metal face was capable of. "You have been reluctant to go before. Following the last time, you were in unstable emotional condition. What has caused you to change your mind?" He could express concern; whoever had designed the PHADs had known what they were doing, and had succeeded in creating a line of sturdy robotic assisters who were the closest thing to life that man could create. Yet for all of his realism, Nemo had none of the verisimilitude of human emotion. He was a robot, and while he was definitely the most lifelike model, he was still nothing more than a machine, unable to pursue anything more than his original programming.

"Miss Tera?"

Tera jolted herself out of her brief, brooding reverie, pulling the flight goggles down from her helmet and over her eyes. "Don't mind me, Nemo," She smiled. "I _said_ I'm fine, right?" With that, she flicked the ignition and adjusted herself to the steady vibrations as the bike's magnetic system activated, picked up the repulsing force under the street, and picked itself up off the ground, leaving the single forward wheel planted firmly to facilitate steering. The world around seemed to blur, as the road ahead snapped into deadly sharp focus, and her bike growled forward, swerved around a car, and vanished up the road.

Nemo waited for traffic to abate before trotting with as much dignity as his three-foot-tall frame could muster across the street.

* * *

_A low sigh. Very low, as if artificially deepened and extended. "Have you found him yet?"_

_Silence. Silence which seemed to hiss with an almost tangible sense of forboding. "No."_

"_And why not?" A hint of anger had forced itself into that voice, tightening it into a pinched sort of growl. "Why are you interrupting me if you haven't found him?"_

"_You seem to forget just how large the Surface is. He could be anywhere." Slyness now, a concealed subcurrent of contempt. _

_Another sigh, which drew itself out, becoming a curse. "'He could be anywhere'. How old and stupid do you think I am?" Something burned, torched in a sudden fit of wrath. "Well, then, 'Curses, foiled again'!" The voice's bearer shifted and leaned forward patronizingly. "Is that would you would like to hear? Perhaps some maniacal laughter? I am perfectly aware of how much space he has to flee in. We found him before; we will find him again. Waiting is becoming tiresome."_

"_I am sorry." Rigid, formal apology. It meant nothing._

"_Oh, shut up. I'm not buying your loyal minion act today. If you feel like being a disrespectful incompetent, at least do me the service of not pretending I'm too old and stupid to punish you." Mirth had now crept in, mingling with a sort of sadistic pleasure. _

_The rigidness solidified further in an attempt to stem the tide of fury building up behind an emotionless façade. "My apologies are genuine." _

"_Foist it on your paying customers; it won't work on me. Now, where is he?"_

"_I said I do not know. He has not been found." _

"_And that's our problem, isn't it?__" the voice screeched, rising several octaves. "Why are you even here?"_

"_l...forgive me, it is not important."_

_Heavily breathing now, the angry voice seemed to consider something before adding, loudly, "Well then. Go find that useless golem so we can work on _remedying_ our problem. I have listening to do."_ _The following low sigh was never__ completed, as it was drowned out by a deep hum, and its maker disappeared._

* * *

He was spattered with grease from head to toe.

While Tera's fifteen-year-old brother _could_ be described as fairly good-looking, he was usually too engrossed in whatever new technical venture he had embarked on to notice anybody watching him, and if he did, he would cheerily call them over to bury them in his world of mechanical parts and robotics. Now, on the front lawn of the Ankiel family's medium-sized suburb residence, he was sweating profusely, grumbling almost as much, and straining to pull a connection into place. Momentarily, he released his pliers and dropped his hand to his knee, resting his chin on it and peering peevishly at the stubborn bit of metal he had been struggling with. As if enlightened, he blew on his reddened hand, shook it, wrapped a greasy rag around it, and wrenched at the pliers as hard as he could. There was an audible 'click' as something shifted.

There. He could successfully boast that he had completely disassembled his father's car motor and rebuilt it in less than seven hours, taking time to learn every aspect (well, _almost _every) of its shiny silver interior as he went. Summer vacation was a wonderful thing, he thought to himself, wiping strings of sweaty deep-brown hair from his forehead and leaving trails of oily black. Noticing for the first time the approaching electric whine of his sister's bike, he stood up and let her spray the greasy grass, and himself, with a dull sheet of muddy water from the puddle beside the sidewalk. "Nice one!" She said, dragging off her helmet and appraising the lawn with a sarcastically happy smile. "I'm sure Mom's just going to be thrilled at what you did to the lawn!"

He shrugged, as if for the first time noticing the mess he had made. "I fixed Dad's engine," he said offhandedly, but the pride was evident in his voice.

"Yeah, and probably took your time doing it. All he had to do was replace the old charger link thing. This _might_ have been overkill."

He waved dismissively at her. "So? It's fixed, right?"

Tera threw her arms and helmet into the air, gazing skyward as if to say 'Lord take me now'. "If you say so! I'm just remembering what happened the _last_ time you said that."

Snapping out an arm quickly, the young mechanic caught her flying headgear and offered it back to her. "You're just jealous, I can't help it if I'm a mechanical prodigy."

"Mechanical prodigy, my face," Tera grumbled.

He grinned as cheekily as possible, like some sort of demonic chipmunk if such a thing existed. "Hey, Mom's not even here so don't go shooting at me. I'll clean it up, don't worry!"

"Why does that _make_ me worry, Kax? Answer me that." She mounted the porch and glared back at him.

Callix Ankiel, more commonly known by his awkward nickname Kax, ignored her. He made a great show of whistling as he ambled off, filthy hands in baggy jeans pockets, to go find a hose.

Tera rolled her eyes again, and, digging her keys out of her own pocket, unlocked the door and obstreperously slammed it shut behind her.

* * *

Tera's father was gone at the moment; he had hitched a ride with a co-worker to his job, what with his car being out of it for the day. Eric Ankiel—roboticist, inventor, and complete technical geek—had passed down his obsessive genes to Kax and left all of the down-to-earth ones that made him tolerable to be with behind. At least, that was Tera's theory; she had begun developing it from the age of four, when she realized that having a younger brother was more of a hindrance than any form of blessing.

Swiping a granola bar from the package on the counter, she bent over to inspect the contents of the refrigerator through its transparent glass front. Another piece of intrigue from years past. Her father often jokingly spoke of inventing some sort of force field to cover it, but since the glass kept the cold in and the heat out anyway, Tera personally found the idea more than redundant. The more interesting variation would be the one that her mother had brought up sometime in March of two years ago, when she was irritated to find that Kax had pinched the last of the diet Coke. Mrs. Ankiel had decided on the spot that, if ever a force field came into play to replace the glass over the fridge, it would need a way to be programmed to activate and electrocute certain people when they reached for particular items. The rest of the family had gotten quite the laugh out of this, although the mother had been quick with her halfway-indignant and good-natured rebuttal, saying that they could store money without fear of it being stolen.

Tera found some leftover tacos, and after chucking them into the flash-oven for half a minute, flopped down on the couch in front of the TV with the food on a plastic plate in her lap. The plate was decorated with deformed, anatomically impossible cartoon animals marching around the edge; it was one of the few remaining artifacts from when she and her brother had been toddlers in high chairs screaming for organic applesauce and Cheerios. This one had a blue elephant in the middle.

The news, as usual, was boring, filled with fake smiles packed with fake teeth in fake faces which flapped methodically in the movements of monotonous speech, bubbling out some story about how the peace was still being kept between the United Republic of America and North Korea, a teacher was arrested for forcing her class to break the first amendment with prayers or something, a post-gender pride march downtown, and whether or not there would be another fatal outbreak of AIDS somewhere. Tera flipped channels in between bites, avoiding sitcoms, soap operas, and, quite understandably, the news. Eventually, she gave up, and settled to eat her tacos in silence.

This was almost a daily ritual by now; she still found herself incredulous that most of the half-decent shows had been cancelled. After Kax put down the controller and exiled his collection of 39 ancient video game consoles to the shelf in favor of gaming on his portable, the Ankiel television became a useless silver slab of screen which sulkily dominated part of the wall.

The elephant was no longer obscured by food, so Tera got up and dropped her plate with a brittle clatter into the sink, glancing at the clock built into the fridge as she did so. Meh. Only five.

Eventually, she retired with a book to her room, to whittle away the last few hours of quiet that she would be able to relish for a while.

* * *

"_Oh, hi. __Any luck telling him?"_

"_Of course not, you idiot." _

"_What went wrong?"_

"_What do you think went wrong?" Snap._

_Hadn't expected a question. "He got mad at you again?"_

"_That was rhetorical. Have there been any changes?"_

_Dust kicked, forming a dingy grayish cloud. "Uh…"_

"_Will you stop that!"_

"…_sorry. I mean, no. No changes. I think it was just, uh, a tremor. Or turbulence." The dust settled._

"_Good. Be patient, and stay ready. He is listening tonight." Kick. "And _stop _that!" A low hum, rising in pitch, quavering as it filled the air._

_And then all was silent once more._

* * *

By now, the water heater had been running non-stop for about ninety minutes. With an annoyed grunt, Tera flipped onto her back and stared at the ceiling, while she let her breath out in a long hiss to calm herself down. Kax had been told to limit his shower times, but usually, once he went in, the whole of the URA Armed Forces would have difficulty in dragging him out. Oh well. Tera was not the entire army, but she was his sister, and that should at least command some small amount of respect and/or authority. She rolled to her feet with some effort, stretched the kink out of her neck, and ambled towards her target.

"Knock-knock," Shouted Tera against the door to the bathroom, and was rewarded with the sound of the water thudding off. The pipes whined as the pressure cut abruptly, moaning out a sound she mentally likened to that of a helium-dosed bovine mammal. "You should be clean now, unless you fell asleep in there."

No reply. The pipes squealed again, as the water resumed its noise. Kax had heard, but Kax did not need to listen.

Tera had heard stories that her father had told, about how in college he and a group of his friends would locate the dorm water heaters at ungodly hours, and turn them all off, just in time for the other students to take their showers. Laughingly, she had joked that, had that little incident been brought up during his job interview, he wouldn't be a scientist.

The only problem was that now, you couldn't turn off a water heater. It was built into the plumbing system, and looked more like a grate than a giant tank filled with heated water. So freezing Kax alive wasn't a solution. Giving up, Tera resolved to figure out a way to make him pay the water bill somehow. He had been forced to do it before, after he had turned on all of the faucets as an April Fools prank years ago.

She started involuntarily as her phone beeped softly, announcing a call. Somebody had turned off the custom ringtone function which assigned a particular song for each of the callers. "Kax," she said matter-of-factly, "If you screw with my phone again, I will insure that your death is long and painful." It was said with the disruptive sound of water running to mask it, so she knew that he wouldn't hear it. Her annoyed little explosion was less of a threat and more of a personal reminder to password-lock the entire stupid piece of electronics. The ring repeated itself; she irritably flipped the device open without waiting for the liquid crystal screen to pool fully, and pressed it against her ear where her wayward ashen-yellow hair wouldn't get in the way. "Hello?" She began, hesitantly, like a young child answering the telephone for the first time.

"Hello, girlfriend! Got a date for tonight yet?" Alisa, half-kidding if her tone was to be construed correctly. Nobody else burst out like that.

"Hi." Tera let the date bit slide. It slid very, very far.

"Just 'hi'? Are you down or something?"

Tera experimentally chewed on a fingernail, realized what she was doing, and dropped her hand to her side again with a dull thump as it brushed the wall she was leaning against. "No. I've been trying to get Kax out of the shower before he causes a drought."

Alisa was quiet for a moment, a time long enough without her chatter to be considered a miracle. "Try using a bullwhip, you know? A Taser? I've heard that those work well. Anyway, I called to say that the match this evening's been moved up to nine. Some scheduling debacle, who knows. Anyway, make sure you remember. We'll be there to pick you up! Bye-ee!"

Click.

Still holding the cell phone, Tera whipped around, suddenly aware that Kax was standing there. "Finally," She smirked, arms akimbo.

"What?" Kax stared at her innocently.

"You're out of the shower."

"Yeah, and?"

Tera suppressed a laugh. "Alisa recommended that I take a bullwhip to you."

"Well hello to her, too. Anyway, are you going somewhere?" He was wearing the same black T-shirt with the bike logo on it that he had been during his engine repairing spree. What the point was of taking a shower and then putting on filthy clothes again, was beyond his sister's comprehension. But then again, most of the things that Kax did would classify themselves outside of the thought patterns of practically any human being. Many times, Tera had considered letting him in on this private idea just to spite him, but most likely, he would take it as a compliment.

His question still needed answering, so she glanced at her watch with a brisk, businesslike motion and stated shortly, "Games at nine." Quite frankly, she did not want to talk about the Games. She had given into Alisa's prodding, after all that had happened the last time she had stepped into the blinding glare of the arena lights and heard the shouts of enthusiastic crowd-members twist into ugly calls for blood. Tera flicked her gaze down towards the hand which still held her phone, clutching it so tightly that the knuckles had bleached themselves white. "I'm going to go get ready."

Twisting herself sideways, she attempted to sidle past her brother and escape to her room. But the world always had to have those terribly persistent people, among them Kax, could not take a hint, no matter how obvious it might be. Kax held out an arm; an expression which Tera could not identify as more than curiosity flickered across his features. "Huh. Last time, you practically died of shock. And what was with all that screaming I heard about?"

Oh. So apparently, now it was time to be a jerk. Tera affixed a crude imitation of a smile to her disgusted face "I saw a man die, Kax," she said, fake cheer bouncing from her tone. "D-I-E. Die. He was only a little older than me, and he was dead. He spoke his last words. Right there, and then he _died._ And now you expect me to just forget about it?" The façade of happiness bled out almost frighteningly quickly.

Despite his cocky exterior, Kax could be solemn when he wanted to be, and right now, his grin wavered and, while it remained in place, it was a rough, silly shadow. "I never said that. All I said was that…"

Tera's blue eyes flashed, as her dangerously short fuse sparked. "Yes," she spat, wishing more than anything that he wasn't her brother, so she could slug him, hard. "You basically go and make light of the whole situation, and then," She paused for emphasis, pulling her lips back in a feral sneer, "You hope that your idiotic, convoluted logic will take care of it." She roughly elbowed past him with a low curse, forced through clenched teeth, and practically fell through the doorway to her room, letting the door's narrow piston prevent it from slamming.

She sat down hard on the floor, looking up at the ceiling It had been a year, yet she still could not forget that blood-glazed face, one eye screwed shut and trickling pinkish fluid. The hoarse, cracking whisper of his last words still was there, in the back of her head. She hadn't even _known_ the guy. She managed a bitter laugh, quietly, so that Kax wouldn't hear her.

Her reaction hadn't even been so strong when her grandfather succumbed to cancer. And she had known him for fifteen years of her life. But rationalization didn't stop the fact that thinking of Dead Gladiator Guy made her chest clench up like she couldn't breathe.

Struck with a sudden, madly nervous inspiration, she carefully crept to her door and locked it, then double-checked the house intercom. Off, good. Window shut. With hesitant steps, the girl drifted toward the center of her room and knelt. Hunched over like a turtle retreated within its private bunker, she shut her eyes tightly and began whispering a fervent prayer, aware that the tears were trickling down her cheeks and dampening the carpet as she inwardly cried out for the soul of the dead man to be saved. It was a short prayer, and barely thirty seconds later she was awkwardly climbing to her feet and going after the windows and intercom and locked door in an effort to return things to normal. It was a short prayer, but it had to be.

Standing awkwardly half-way down the hall, Kax looked towards his own watch.

Two hours left.

* * *

When Tera's mother finally returned, it was near eight. "You look nice," she said, inspecting her daughter who had opened the door. "Are you going somewhere?"

You look nice. Always the first thing anybody ever said, excluding boys, who Tera was a socially retarded idiot with, and who largely ignored her anyway. Sometimes, she had a deep, nagging feeling that secretly she was a giant walking billboard of average niceness, somewhere in the low middle of the hot-to-not spectrum. Afflicted by a brief notion of vanity, Tera check herself in the hall mirror as she trailed alongside her mother toward the kitchen. If anything was more than nice, it was her hair, which grew in a bright natural blonde. Overall it achieved an effect which could be compared to some blind florist sticking a sunflower at the top of a flower arrangement chiefly comprised of baby's breath and nondescript ferns. Tera once tried to have it permanently darkened to counter this effect, but it _still_ grew in blond, and Kax's suggestion of getting it colorshocked only earned a bored glare. That sort of thing was murder on the scalp. Dandruff was not on her bucket list.

Ah, yes. Mom had asked where she was going. Righty. "Games."

And now came the disapproving glance that all mothers have been experts at since the dawn of time. "Are you sure?"

The answer. "Yes." An answer…? Or a blatant baldfaced lie forged of denial and other deep, meaningfully, soul-wrenching things? Actually, she reflected, it was probably both.

"Well, sweetie, you are old enough to go. If you really want to, I won't stop you."

"Thanks, Mom." There was the barest undertone of sarcasm, which Tera doubted her mother would pick up on.

She didn't.

Instead, Laura Ankiel smiled graciously and opened the fridge to fix dinner.

* * *

Old Word Count: **4549**

New Word Count: **5196**

Re-reading this was embarrassing. It's still not quite up to par with the later chapters, and reeks of small-child-trying-too-hard in places, but I'll just pass that off as being part of Tera's character growth or something. The sections I re-wrote are fairly obvious. The entire beginning is much less painful and I managed to touch up a lot of dialogue. The most conspicuous alteration is the total revision of the _EVIL ITALICS PEOPLE OMG_, because I'd hope a fellow would have at least a little personality evolution over the course of time, and because I'd rather not write characters who sound as though they're reading out of Evil Diatribes for Dummies. Expect the other rants to be redone as well.

In case you're wondering what you just read – it's a **semi-AU** **continuation of Cave Story following the Bad Ending and the events of **_**Soldier from the Surface**_ (which was my first fic). It does not become firmly integrated with Cave Story until chapter 10, and even then only in the last couple of paragraphs. There are many elements from the game and its surrounding mythos, but they will likely not become clear until later.

Thank you so much for reading ASCfR, and I hope you enjoy the following chapters as well.


	2. Here Goes Everything

Ok, that was a tad more than a couple of days, but I was quite busy. Plus, this chapter was unbelievably boring to write, mainly since I was buzzing with ideas for chapter 3. Hopefully this won't be as dull to read as it was to write, but it does have some very important plot stuff that goes on. Also, it is the last no-action chapter for quite a while, what with things going to heck in a bullet train in the next installment. So read on, and for all you people itching for something to happen, just hang in there. Chapter 3 is on the way.

I don't own Cave Story (though I wish I did).

Also, this is the last completely un-Cave Story chapter. 3 has a zillion references to it, and 4 is flat-out fanfiction. By 5...yeah, I'm just boring you now, so why don't you go ahead and read? Reviews are nice also, they help me write faster, and better. Only if they're helpful. If you feel the need to flame/spam, please restrain the urge.

* * *

_A Second Chance for Redemption_

A semi-original fiction by

Fusionmix

_Chapter 2_

†††

…_A little taste of hypocrisy,  
And I'm left in the wake of the mistake, slow to react.  
Even though you're so close to me, you're still so distant,  
And I can't bring you back…_

ALMOST HESITANTLY, Tera followed her mother out of the glow of the evening sun and into the relative darkness of the house. "Mom?" she began, voice still unsure. What she wanted to say was not altogether worked out in coherent form yet. Laura glanced towards her in acknowledgement, briskly chopping cucumber as she did so. Tera opened her mouth to continue from where she stood in the entryway, before thinking better of it and joining her mom on the linoleum of the kitchen. "I…" her voice trailed off.

Quirking an eyebrow, Laura turned her attention from dinner preparations to her daughter. "You were saying?" It was such an innocent phrase, yet behind it was an undercurrent which declared, 'this must be important, so you aren't leaving until I hear about it.' When no answer came, Tera's mother sighed and put down her vegetable knife. "This is about tonight, isn't it?"

"Yes." Tera said it shortly, quietly, but strongly. Into it she forced all of the apprehension and her anger at her own self for giving in to Alisa's suggestion.

The eyebrows furrowed in triumph, as well as further contemplation. "You know, you don't really have to go if you don't want to." Tera took in the breath that was to say, 'Yes, but I _want_ to go!', but Laura Rothan gave her the disapproving glance which all mothers have been experts at since the dawn of time. "So," she said, slow and steady, "You're absolutely sure about this? Why do you want to go anyway?" The vegetable knife resumed its steady slicing, this time to pierce a tomato.

The 17-year-old sat awkwardly on the edge of the counter for a few minutes, watching as the silver knife slid gracefully through a second tomato, quickly reducing it to bite-size chunks, which were handily flicked into a salad bowl. "Cucumber salad?"

"You are bad at changing subjects, aren't you?" It was such an oddly true thing for her mom to say, that Tera couldn't help a short chuckle. Laura continued, "But yes, we are having cucumber salad. Now back to our original topic."

"Well," Tera looked intently in the direction of the ceiling, as if for inspiration, but the light-yellow painted surface succeeded in performing nothing for her concentration. "I'm old enough to go, right?" She picked up rhythm, as something which she had wanted to say for a while began falling into place. "Aren't you being a little restrictive?" She said it with a lilting carelessness, but her eyes were sharp, and her ears sharper.

"Restrictive," Laura mused, "How so? I never said that you couldn't go."

Oh god. Having an argument with Mom was like trying to walk across a minefield. At first, you were sure that the end was in sight; that it was right there, in reach; so that you could make one last leap and be in the clear. And then she had to put down another row of mines which commanded circumnavigation before anything else could happen. It was true. Laura had never said anything at all about not allowing her the freedom to go to the Games. So most of Tera's argument took an unlucky step and got itself blown to smithereens, and the rest of what she had wanted to say was lacerated by shrapnel. "Yes…" she said as a last line of defense, "But…"

Knowingly, Laura put down more mines, seeing victory in sight. "All I'm doing is bringing it into the light that you really, in fact, do not want to go to the arena."

The code was broken, the war lost. Tera frustratedly purloined a wayward piece of cucumber and munched on it as she pushed herself off of the counter and paced back and forth across the linoleum, not completely aware that she was doing so. "You're the one who's so obsessive with the rules. According to your precious law, I'm old enough to watch an arena match. If I want to go, I'm going." With that ultimatum, she finished off her cucumber slice and strode out of the kitchen, only stopping to snap, "I'm going to get ready. Alisa's picking me up at eight-thirty."

"Just remember," her mom called after her, "Just because something is written in a law doesn't make it true."

She was too late. Tera was already upstairs, calling down, "Mom! Do I have any jeans that aren't dirty?"

Laura half-turned away from her salad and replied, "I just washed a pair yesterday; they should be hanging in the shower upstairs!"

Tera froze, with a sharp wince. "So— they were there since the morning?"

"Yes. Why?"

Tera did not bother to answer why. She tore across the landing, into the bathroom, and wrenched open the shower door. Sure enough, the jeans were there, but Kax, the little beast that he was, had not taken the trouble to remove them and hang them up before taking his shower. The end result was that they were soaked, through and through. Tera closed her eyes very tightly and counted to ten before dragging them off of the towel hook and hanging them over the edge of the shower door.

Ah well. Wearing a pair of jeans for the fourth time in a row wouldn't hurt her any. Besides, fashion had shifted and torn-up 'worn' pants were back in style. Her pair of gardening jeans would do nicely, what with the jagged hole in the knee and the frayed edge of the pockets. Fingering the threadbare fabric, more memories came back; yard work three years ago, when twelve-year-old Kax jerked the stepladder out from under her, 'by mistake', as she was trimming a shrub. Tera's knee scraped painfully against the brick of the house as she tipped sideway and flattened the zinnias. She would have flattened Kax, too, except that her father told her forcibly to sit down while he got disinfectant to put on her knee, which was bleeding at a ridiculous rate. Now, she could look back at the incident, and laugh, but at the time Kax had been lucky. Tera had given him a black eye before; she wouldn't hesitate to do it again. She possessed formidable black-eye-giving skills, which her mother often lamented, saying, "Why can't you just _slap_ people like other girls do?"

Tera knew why she didn't slap people. If somebody ever had her cornered, in a position from which she was at a disadvantage, she would not waste precious time with trivial, meaningless blows. A slap was a definite signal of rebellion, of anger, and if she was in danger from somebody who was most likely already infuriated, she would rather not stir up the embers of hatred. So striking Kax in the eye was her idea of practice. Tera did not intend to be wedged into the aforementioned situation, but were it ever to occur, she felt that she had to be ready.

* * *

Nine PM was quite close, but from where Tera sat on the window ledge, Alisa's car was still not in sight. Smacking her lips, she frowned darkly. Salad dressing had the world's weirdest aftertaste sometimes.

The realization of why she had decided all along to go to the Games had become apparent to her, about an hour ago. It was still about impressing her 'friends', making them accept her. Tera recognized that all the time, for all four years she had known them, she was the displaced one, the person on the outside. It was ninth grade all over again, acting like an idiot just because she suddenly felt so damn insecure, and trying to be somebody who could just go with the flow.

That was her problem. When she had first moved, she forced herself into an uptight, shallow, mirror-image of herself, and when she let down that façade, it was like she had never been there.

* * *

It pulled up at 9:13, all black metal and mercury-silver chrome, purring throatily as it slid up the driveway. The car's motion seemed jerky and unsteady to Tera, but all her life she had either driven her magnet-levitation motorcycle, or her dad's maglev automobile. This one still had its wheels; she could tell from a glance that it was a converted racecar from thirty or so years ago. Four-wheeled vehicles were still used outside of cities and off of roads where the ground lacked electromagnets, and also on racetracks; since maglev was frictionless, a vehicle trying to whip around a corner would find itself heading for a swift and unpleasant crash with the circuit perimeter guard-walls. But with the waning sunlight flickering across its sleek sides, this car was a beauty. "Kiara's driving today." Tera mused out loud. Kiara's father was fairly wealthy, and his hobby was rescuing old beaten hulks from the compactors and rebuilding them into gorgeous beasts capable of dominating any showroom floor.

Aware that she should be downstairs, Tera reminded herself that she would be sitting the car, and she could stop looking at it now. Not surprisingly, as she pulled a quick turn from the hall to the stairs, she noticed Kax ogling it from one of the windows. "I'm leaving!" she shouted, loud enough for anybody in the house to hear. Mom didn't answer, but then again, she was probably in the utility room, which might as well have been soundproof. Pulling open the house door, she returned Kax's preoccupied wave, and was gone.

As she approached the vehicle, the door swung noiselessly upward. Kiara threw an arm around the headrest of the driver's seat and strained backwards to grin at Tera. "I'm putting the top down, so wait a second. Somebody shut the door." The door flipped down again, and Tera's ears were filled with a low-pitched whine as the roof separated in two, with the larger half sliding backwards towards the truck, and the relatively narrow front half crumpling itself into a compact ridge in front of the windshield. "Ok," the door opened again. "In you go."

And in Tera went. The seats, covered by tight-stretched black leather, were exceedingly attractive. Considering the new-car leather smell, Tera poked at the passenger seat in front of her, and decided that she was glad to be wearing jeans. This leather was the devilish type that stuck to legs. Settling herself comfortably, she sought for a seatbelt, but found none. "Oh, never mind that," said Alisa from where she was sitting next to her, "We're only breaking about five different travel safety laws about now." Tera felt a slight prickle of unease, but said nothing, letting a slightly apprehensive smile flicker across her face.

Kiara turned around again. "Everybody all ready?" She said in an obnoxious sing-song voice, flicking black hair out of her equally dark eyes. Since everybody appeared ready, _and_ displayed an intense lack of amusement, she jabbed the key chip into the ignition, and then replaced it in her pocket after the engine began humming. "Here we go!" The sing-song thing was going to get on Tera's nerves, she could tell.

"Well," Kiara began as the car pulled in reverse out of the driveway and made an elegant, if not a bit jerky, arc to face in the direction they wanted to go. "I was going to go off and tell everybody about the car, but figured I'd better wait for you to get here first." She put her foot to the gas pedal lightly; the car lunged backwards. "Whoopsie."

With an exasperated noise, Alisa's partner Anzl half-stood and leaned over Kiara's chair to gesture towards the dashboard and indicate that the vehicle was set in reverse. He had barely re-seated himself before Kiara figured out what she was doing, and with a quiet grind of gears, got them moving forward this time. "Thanks. Now where was I?" As she began her story, she nearly flattened somebody's cream-furred dog, who dove out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed.

Anzl's voice was tight when he spoke. For an eighteen-year-old with Color-Shocked white hair and probably a total of one pound of metal on him when his piercings were combined, he could be very solemn when he needed to be. "Get on the road first before we break any homeowner's laws. When we're at the arena, _then_ we can talk." Since he was over six feet tall, and had freakishly long arms, he was able to place one hand on the steering wheel and stop Kiara from running up the curb while she turned around to berate him.

"You guys are too finicky," Kiara mumbled as he sat down again, accelerating past the twenty MPH speed limit for residential areas. "Just for that, I'm picking what we listen to today."

A collective moan passed through the vehicle. Tera had only heard about Kiara's eclectic music preferences, but the few tales of seventy-year-old metal were enough to frighten her. "Joy."

Smiling devilishly, Kiara set the car to cruise control while she perused a box of compressed media file chips, or CMF's. Marty leaned over from the passenger seat, scrubby reddish-gold hair still staying upright due to copious amounts of gel. "How old is that stuff?" Noticing a chip which she had dropped, he stretched to pick it up. "Damn," he said admiringly. He pronounced the word in two syllables, _da-yum_, giving the normally offensive bit of profanity an amusing touch.

Kiara glanced over at what he had found, relieved him of it, and barely managed to swerve around a cardboard box on the road, and duck under a flying plastic bag. As they got nearer to downtown, the amount of debris became readily apparent, and the number of other vehicles increased.

The electromagnets were the most powerful on the freeways, so most cars converged there, allowing themselves to be carried on the great veins leading into the heart of the city. The growling part-combustion engine of their own machine seemed out of place compared to the nearly silent humming of the magnet-levitation cars. From the history Tera knew, they were all based off of the German magnet trains from nearly a century ago, but more specifically, the Japanese Maglevs which could go five hundred miles per hour seventy years ago, and even faster today. Screaming soundlessly overhead, the maglev was still in use, and provided a much faster (if not more crowded) alternative to driving oneself where one wanted to go.

Tera was uncomfortably jolted out of her thinking, by a scratchy whine from the car's music player. "Is it supposed to do that?"

Kiara frowned at it. "Well, crap." She pulled into a less occupied lane and gingerly poked her fingers into the slot. There was a smoky smell in the air, only very briefly however, for the wind whisked it away. Convertibles have benefits. "Crap!" Kiara said again, louder this time. She recoiled from the music player, holding the blackened file chip. Anzl leaned over her head again and took hold of the wheel, pulling over to the side of the road. Tera privately wished that he would drive instead of Kiara, who had barely just gotten her license.

Anzl stayed leaned-over just long enough to stare at the twisted CMF chip. It was smoking faintly, and without the convertible's movement to generate wind, the smell was bordering on overpowering. "I'm hoping that wasn't what we were going to listen to."

Kiara, rather than looking upset, merely smiled. "Actually, it was. That was pretty stupid of me, wasn't it?" Before anybody could ask what had gone wrong, she continued, saying, "That's a CD slot, not a CMF one."

CD's had faded from mainstream use over the last twenty years. They were replaced in favor of the CMF chip, which could hold far more data, was smaller, didn't scratch when put down or tossed about, and had two plugs on it: one for computer USB ports, the other for new car stereos.

Once they were safely underway, Kiara hit cruise control again and browsed a second box, this one jammed with CD's. "I have stuff in here from the 1900's," she stated proudly. "Cool, huh? Anyway, what shall I torture you with today…?"

After a perfunctory rummage through her box, Kiara triumphantly held up a plain silver CD with Sharpie pen scribbled on it. "What," Alisa moaned. "Is that supposed to be?"

She was answered by a happy clicking noise from the CD player as Kiara pushed 'play', and an explosion of something that was definitely the 70-year-old metal Tera had been warned of. Marty appeared to be drumming along with the beat using his feet, making most of the car shake. Not the tallest guy in the world, he was still heavy enough to cause Tera a certain amount of discomfort. She considered asking him to stop, but Kiara slammed on the brakes and slid into another lane, sending Tera and everybody else falling sideways in a heap.

"Effin' dog," Kiara growled savagely, honking at the lightly cream-colored animal. As if he had not a care in the world, it was trotting across the freeway. "If he doesn't look out, he'll get himself all over somebody's prettyful car."

Alisa gave the closest thing possible to a contemptuous look. "Prettyful?" Obviously, using eighth-grade terms for things had just been taken off of the list of acceptable actions.

Tera ignored their argument, noticing that the dog had leaped to the top of the guardrail. It turned around, wagged its tail, and leaped over the edge. Over twenty feet…a drop capable of instantly killing a human, and probably a dog too. It was the same one that had nearly been squashed at the beginning of the trip.

Anzl poked the still-fuming Kiara in the shoulder. "Just go," he said quietly, eyes looking ahead. She nodded mechanically, dumbly, and brought the car out of a standstill to sixty miles in around three seconds, as the singer began belting out what sounded like a conclusion verse. Why Tera was even paying attention, she had no clue.

The idea of cars stopping for a mere dog, and not a very large one at that, seems ludicrous at first, but with the vehicle is 'floating' less than a foot above the ground, having an animal jam between it and the road would cause it to spin out of control, probably causing a massive wreck. How the dog actually managed to get onto the freeway past the electrical barriers and fencing, nobody knew. It was a just a dog, another mangy mutt who couldn't find a decent home.

Track 2 was slightly less tolerable than Track 1; it lacked the gargling thing, preferring to come out from the gate with a probing beat and lyrics uttered in what sounded like a stress-cracked intonation. Shallow lyrics flew into a chorus, screaming about being driven closer to the edge of something or other. Ignoring it, Tera tried to do likewise with the fear bubbling away at her insides, but the latter refused to happen. Another Arena game, which might have another Gladiator getting hurt, and her stuck seeing him die.

Taking a deep breath, she leaned against the side of the car and let the wind attack her hair. If she but thought about the games, an image of a face appeared, slashed with blood and bruised black and purple until the line between human and corpse blurred. If she did not instantly shove it away, she would start hearing the whispers of an apathetic crowd, and through it all the cracked, broken voice grinning past swollen gums and quite literally saying 'Hey'. Tera lifted a hand to scratch her forehead where the wind was tickling, but found a teardrop on the way. _Stupid, stupid, stupid! _She despairingly chided herself. _You'll never forget if you don't stop bringing it back_.

Somebody touched her arm, she blinked hard a few times, seeing the Gladiator's face staring at her, but it was only Marty. He had red hair, not the obsidian blue-black of the dying man. Tera frantically wondered if she was going insane. "'Sup." She mumbled, hiding it all behind an expressionless mask.

Marty shook his head. "Not much," He smiled, very toothily. "I thought you fell asleep. We'll be there in like five minutes. Third-row seats." His face was a halo of glee, but then again, Marty liked the most violent computer games in existence, the ones that earned their makers lawsuits. Somehow, Tera suspected that he would grow up to be a Gladiator himself.

Tera forced a pleased look onto her face. "Tight."

"Yep." The conversation ended as abruptly as it had begun. Marty joined in on the chat about who would be fighting, and who to bet on. Tera quite frankly felt like actually going to sleep, and napping through the match.

* * *

_The humming again, overflowing into the air, slowly faded again as its maker came into view. _

"_Ah, you have come back already. He has been found."_

_Looking down. "No. He has not."_

_The voice seemed to smile. "And how would you know?" The fake patronizing tone was there, speaking as through the listener were stupid._

"_Because I did not find him."_

"_What if I did?"_

_Surprise now, a sudden upward jerk of the head. "My lord?"_

_A sigh, deep and menacing. "It has been a long time since I heard you call me that."_

_Although this would have caused anger before, urgent intrigue forced a question. "You have found him? How…"_

"_I felt him. Months ago I felt him, but now, he is angry, his fury is looking for fuel to feed itself. I feel the drain."_

"_And that means what?"_

"_It means that soon, he will ignite. He will ignite and burn, burn like a beacon that will lead me to him. Now do you understand?"_

_A brief, acknowledging nod. "Yes."_

"_Yes what?"_

_Rebelliousness, smoldering in eyes only half-concealed behind a curtain of dark locks. _

"_Yes, my lord."_

_She pressed as much hate into the words as she could._

* * *

Before the next song's guitar could quite finish its heartbroken wail, Kiara once again inserted the ignition chip, and everything fell silent, save for the distant babbling of people, clumped into noisy little knots as they headed towards the Arena entryway. Tera inhaled sharply, and then let it out slowly, in an effort to calm herself. In a half-whisper, half-thought, she stated simply, "Here goes nothing."

* * *

Word Count: **3769**

Bum bum bum! Do we know who are the mysterious italic-speaking peoples yet? Hopefully you do, but if you don't, fear not, identities are (largely) revealed in Chaptero Three. Which shows up sometime next week. Yup.

Also, sorry if Tera seems a little juvenile in this chapter, but I couldn't seem to work it out properly. Her soppiness here will (hopefully) be gone by next time, I assure you.

Thanks to people for leaving reviews, even TEH NUKEMAN, who makes about as much sense as a monkey himself. Oh well.


	3. I Do What I Must Because I Can

Here's the third chapter. Very sorry for how unbelievably long it took me to post it, the whacking great Gladiator battle thing in the middle got me good. I'm terrible at fight scenes, so it took me a coupla days to get it how I wanted it, and then the rest took me another two days, and then I had to send it to my beta (who isn't on this site), and then I had to edit it, and so all in all...yeah.

Third chapter of ASCfR. Enjoy. Reviews are nice too. They make me happy.

* * *

_A Second Chance for Redemption_

A semi-original fiction by

Fusionmix

_Chapter 3_

†††

…_It's true, the way I feel was promised by your face;  
The sound of your voice, painted on my memories.  
Even if you're not with me, I'm with you…_

THE NOISE OF the crowd, easily audible outside while sitting in the convertible, became even more readily apparent as Anzl opened the door for Alisa and Tera, while Marty and Kiara climbed on their own. When he wanted to be, much like Kax, Anzl was a perfect gentleman. Stepping towards the massive escalators that led underground, to the dug-out arena, Tera felt the fear settle in her chest again, and experienced a sensation of both vertigo and déjà vu. This was the place where her Gladiator died. Annoyed, she pushed the thought away. Why was she calling him _her_ Gladiator? He was just another killer. Had any of the others died right there in front of her, she would have felt the exact same way. It was because of how suddenly his life was taken away, she realized; all because he had never gotten time to live beyond slaughtering.

A few weary gusts withered their way by in dry, fitful bursts, catching hold of Tera's unruly hair and lashing it against her face. Despite the warmth of the summer night, the wind was cold, not exactly in the sense of temperature, but cold just to the body. Its dryness fed on heat, pulling it away to leave Tera shivering. Wishing she had brought a sweater, she quickened her pace to catch up with the others.

Marty and Kiara were excitedly chattering with each other, while Alisa was considering her LCD-screened Pocket-Pad®, which had various Gladiator scores marching across it. Tera couldn't help being mildly interested, so she jogged up alongside her, dodging the people, and inspected the Pocket-Pad. "Is that for the betting?" She suspected that it was, but at least asking this question would get somebody to talk to her.

They were already halfway down the escalators before Alisa answered. "Uh-huh. See? Those are the fighter's callsigns, or nicknames," she tapped a part of the screen, "And those are their win/loss records against other Gladiators, and this is their score in survival combat." Noticing Tera's confused look, she slyly added, "Oh, sorry, I forgot that you haven't come since the first time. Survival is the nonhuman part."

Tera's confusion had actually not stemmed from the survival combat issue. She knew about that, having watched it, and having it virtually burned onto the tissues of her brain. "No, not that…" The bottom of the escalator had come, and she had to step off before she could continue. "…I meant do the Gladiators actually fight each other?"

"Sure!" Kiara answered for her, displaying her own pocket pad as the group approached a second escalator. "That's even more exciting than the survival matches, since sometimes the Controllers put in a bunch of electrical traps and the like. Plus, they usually don't get that injured, since you can win just by knocking out your opponent. If he's down for ten seconds or more, the other guy wins the match. That's the main thing that people bet on, since there's less of a chance of accidental injury that way."

Nodding, Tera hopped off the second escalator and accepted a ticket card from Anzl. "Swipe it like so," he drew his own silver-hued card and swiped it through a ticket machine slot, which read the barcode and beeped. Apparently uninterested in the proceedings, the ticket officer waved him through. The dozy fellow perked up almost immediately when Kiara walked forward, obviously thinking her younger than sixteen, and demanded to see her driver's license, which she held out to him as if holding something repulsive; gripping it by thumb and index finger alone. He squinted at it, ran it under a scanner of sorts, inspected it with a magnification lens, and almost regretfully handed it back. Seeing Kiara's triumphant smirk, he gestured towards her, wanting to search her purse. She gave it to him, glaring the whole time, and snatched it back the second she was able.

There were no further complications, as the swell of people practically shoved them through the gate and into the circular arena walkabout. Row after row of the hard plastic chairs which stick to legs were arranged around the structure, all on a downwards slope to the deep-dug metal-lined pit where the actual combat took place. Tera looked up at the sunset, but since they were over thirty feet underground, the sides of the arena area blocked it off from her vision. All she could see now was indigo blue sky, bruised here and there with brilliant red-tinged flecks of cloud.

"Hey," Kiara poked her. "You walked right past the seats. Wake up!" Tera glanced over to where Anzl was motioning down a gap in the plastic chairs. She cautiously tripped down the steps, nearly falling as a tall man with a beer stuck his legs into the walkway without looking first.

"Sorry, Miss," he said. "Didn't see ya there."

Tera ritually intoned something dull along the lines of 'no harm done' before sliding into her seat on the end of the third row. She had been hoping that there would be some obstruction to the view, but Marty had apparently chosen these seats with good reason. From where they sat to the other side of the battle pit, Tera had a completely unhindered view. Feeling slightly miserable, she slouched, sliding down in her chair until her face was almost even with the back of the seat in front of her.

Kiara poked her again, harder this time. "Are you hungry? We were going to pick up something on the way here, but I was late with the car. And hey, I never told you about how I got to drive it, did I?"

Tera shook her head, dumbly, feeling tenser by the moment, and sat up again. The suggestion of eating something threw a kink into her stomach, reminding her that she hadn't eaten anything since the bowl of salad she had wolfed down at home. Maybe if she pretended to be interested in Kiara's story, it would be over quicker and they could all go find pizza or something.

"Well anyway," said Kiara, searching for a place to leave her purse. "Dad had just bought it, you know, so it was in really bad shape." she hung her bag around Marty's neck, "It was a piece of crap. He buzzed off what was left of the paint, and took off all the sponsor stickers; since it was an old racing car it had a lot of them. I stopped helping then since he only had engine work to do, and I'm no good at that kind of thing. Blah blah blah, he fixed it up, bought new parts, gave it a new paint job, and the whole deal took about a month. Pretty neat, huh?"

Admiration was creeping across Anzl's face. "And he let you drive it?"

Kiara fairly glowed. "Uh-huh! I got my license last week, so he was really proud of me. I haven't bashed the car yet, so I'm pretty sure it'll be getting back to him in one piece."

"What if you don't?" Tera felt the question slip out, and instantly knew that it would probably not be appreciated. She was always saying things like that; they sounded good in her head, but never worked out so hot in the open.

Not seeming to mind, Kiara made a throat-cutting motion with her finger. "I'm dead, that's what. Plus he'll probably arrange to have my license taken away." She paused, looked towards the scoreboard, and pulled a double-take at the time. "Starting in four minutes. We should grab something while we can. You, people, what do you want?" She poked Anzl to get his attention. She jabbed quite a bit harder than Tera thought prudent, but then again, Kiara had a poking obsession.

After she had scribbled down everybody's 'order' on a spare sheet of notebook paper she had produced from her purse, she found a credit card and gave it, along with the list, to Marty. "That's my dad's card, so don't lose it, or else I will kill you, and then my dad will kill me. Got that?"

Martin nodded automatically, stood up, and turned sideways to edge past Tera, who was sitting at the end of the row. "If I get anybody's stuff wrong, blame her," he shouted back, pointing at Kiara as he climbed the steps towards the walkabout where the food vendors were. "I can't read a word of this."

Kiara looked indignant. "My writing isn't that bad. God, you should see _his,_" she said loudly, leaning in the direction he had taken.

"Yeah I know, right?" Alisa chuckled. "Oh hey, Tera, who're you betting on?"

Unprepared for the question, Tera was momentarily struck dumb. She had to bet too? To be sure, she had brought her credit card, but betting? "Um…I don't know. Can I see the stats?" Wordlessly, Alisa passed her Pocket-Pad to Anzl, who handed it to Tera. She scrutinized the screen with eyes half shut, making sure not to miss any details. For this fight, only two Gladiators were listed, one under the callsign 'Gilgamesh', the other put down as 'Rigel'. Tera twirled the stylus between her fingers a few times before tapping on Gilgamesh's display to bring up more information.

Once the screen finished loading, she let out a low whistle. The Gladiator was #1 on the all the charts, with a .923 winning average. 1.0 was the absolute highest a fighter could ever get, meaning that they had never lost a match in an entire season. The cumulative score meant that until the very end of the year, a fighter could not earn a perfect 1.0. It was something to work for, and Gilgamesh had nearly made it. The details went on to describe some of his achievements, including a 30-game winning streak award he had won a few weeks ago. Tera scowled, for some reason hating this apparently amazing fighter, just for being good. A crazy thought entered her mind; she beamed. _This is so completely idiotic_, she thought to herself, closing Gilgamesh's window and opening Rigel's. She noticed that all of his blanks were filled in with N/A. He was a complete rookie. _But here goes_. Still grinning insanely, she handed the Pocket-Pad back and pulled down the scorekeeping/betting panel from the back of the chair in front of her. Had Kax been here, she would have received a long and arduous lecture on the importance of percentages and probabilities in making decisions. Screw logic. Tera quietly swiped her own credit card in the betting panel slot. When asked which Gladiator to back, she did not hesitate.

Looking at the screen after she had decided, she noticed that she was only the seventh person to bet on Rigel. Whatever. Already thinking badly of her verdict, she wished she could take back the two-hundred dollars she had pulled from the credit card and used to back a warrior who would most likely be clobbered in the first few minutes of the Gladiator versus Gladiator match. Ah well.

Marty returned, and once again sidled past her to his own seat, distributing food as he went. Tera noted in slight dismay that her burger did, in fact, have mayonnaise, but she blamed Kiara as Marty had said. No matter what the excuse was, that girl could not write to save her life. Besides, a little mayo never hurt anybody.

She was distracted from the mayo incident by a massive explosion of static through the arena speakers, followed by the blaring voice of the pompous announcer. "Welcome, all you guests, to the Arena on such a wonderful summer night! As you've probably noticed, we have our new Gladiator of the Year here for you to see in action. After he takes the victory for today, he will have a record 50-match winning streak, having won every fight he has participated in so far. Give it up for our very own Gilgamesh!"

The audience flared into life, a screaming, writhing mass which heightened its piercing cries as Gilgamesh himself strode out onto the field, if one could call it that. Clad from head to toe in golden bronze-tinged armor, he was a sight which could intimidate a squad of URA Marines. He strode with an almost loping gait, obviously calm and proud of his status as the best Gladiator of all time. Tera saw the easy grace in his step, and the cool way in which he bowed, and experienced a unique sinking sensation. She instantly wished she had not been so hasty to bet for the inexperienced newcomer. As cameras zoomed in and Gilgamesh appeared on the giant screens set up around the Arena, Tera got a full view of his armor, pockmarked from hundreds of previous conflicts, mended across the front where something had cut the sturdy metal. Standing as a titan would in his half of the circular combat pit, Gilgamesh lived up to his name; he was a man-god, faceless and unknown behind the tinted glass of his helmet visor.

"And for his challenger in the Head-to-Head match later tonight," the announcer rang out, "We have a relative newbie. After suffering from severe injuries in the first quarter of last year's season, he was removed for the rest of the year. Preferring to let his body heal itself, he actually refused to receive any form of outside treatment. He's made a miraculous recovery, but remember folks, he'll be at a disadvantage without any cybernetic enhancements. Here for his first game this season, Rigel!"

It was only as Rigel jogged out of his own entrance to face Gilgamesh that Tera realized with a cold shock why the bronze-armored Gladiator was so graceful. He was mostly robot by now, probably half metal and half flesh, cobbled together with wires and repulsive machinery. A wave of hatred swept through her. Allowing oneself to be clothed in metal for strength was like taking steroids. But she could see now why many requisitioned multi-million dollar robotic legs and arms and organs was a tempting proposal. Rigel appeared pitifully small before his adversary, like a weak boy faced by a giant; Gilgamesh had easily a foot on him, being over seven feet tall. With a sinking feeling, she understood that Rigel was no match for this champion.

But now, Gilgamesh was leaving the field, leaving Rigel to come to the center of it, seeming frail and wobbly in comparison. His armor was quite a bit more attractive, being a deep sky-blue with silver highlights and some sort of bright red symbol emblazoned on both of his shoulders. It fit his motif, considering that his own callsign was obviously a reference to the blue supergiant star Rigel. The symbols, while making his suit more eye-catching, sent an odd shiver down Tera's spine, and the air seemed to suddenly grow cold. The air always went icy whenever fear crawled through her. She wished that the cameras would center on him, so she could see what those emblems were, but since he wasn't famous like Gilgamesh, the big screens ignored him.

The feeling vanished as quickly as it had descended, evaporating into the humid night air as once more, the announcer shouted out. "Get ready for a rousing bout of Survival Combat!" He cleared his throat rudely through the microphone, and then screamed, "GO!"

Through swiftly-opening gaps in the walls of the battle pit, they came, one by one, oozing wormlike beings whose very appearance drove slithering copies of themselves underneath Tera's skin. Rigel sprang into action, activating the strafer jets on his armor and shooting sideways. "Rigel executes a swift dash move away from the opposition!" blared the announcer, "He's looking for a weapon!"

As if in answer, a metal grate slid open, depositing a pair of energy pistols, designed to dissipate against the invisible energy field which covered the combat pit to protect onlookers from stray shots. In a quick scooping motion, Rigel seized them, and, changing direction, rocketed towards the slimy caterpillar creatures. As he passed one, it reared up; its bulky self folded into bloated creases as a tiny beaked mouth spun open and lunged for him.

The mouth fairly exploded, with laser bolts taking a few moments to melt through the back of the squat head and allow thick red blood to splash across metal tiles. Rigel never stopped to gloat, instead dropping to stand on his own two feet and send energy blasts to lacerate two worms which had allowed themselves to slide into the line of fire. The Gladiator reactivated his jets and blasted through a gory mist which spattered the front of his armor, before doubling back to finish off the sorely wounded mutants who were still bent on destroying him.

With the last of the worms in twitching, rubbery piles around the arena, Rigel stood in the middle again, as the next wave of monsters swept out upon him. Altogether unlike the slimy beasts of a moment ago, these bore scythe-like forearms and powerful hind legs, and were amazingly eager to tear into him. A few stopped to ravage the bodies of the worms, but the vast majority, dozens and dozens of them, poured over cracks and inconsistencies in the Arena flooring towards the lone Gladiator.

"Rigel should have an easy time with these little guys," the announcer observed, as if watching a little league tee-ball game. "Jumpers go down pretty fast with those pistols he's got."

The brief examination was proving accurate; jumpers exploded into gory little fireballs all over the field. Their fellow creatures hesitated for a moment, fearful, but right then a third wave of monsters was released, which boasted tough crustacean-like shells over their bodies and enormous bladed claws like those of fiddler crabs. "Ooh, he's going to need something else here," Tera rolled her eyes despite herself, and cast an evil look at the announcer, who was seated at a booth only two rows away. He probably didn't see it, being busy continuing with, "His pistols won't leave a dent on those things."

Once again, the metal grate slid open, and this time, with a slippery metallic noise, a much larger weapon clanked and touched down on the metal plating of the field. The fighter pushed off of a wall and dove between one of the creatures legs, groping madly for it. Jerking it up, Rigel fired, and the gun spat a wave of destruction in a shotgun-like spread. Claws slashing air, the crabs reared onto their grossly bent legs, with thick blackish ooze bubbling from various wounds. Tera concentrated very hard on some nachos as the carnage continued. It was always going to be there, and she would have to endure it for the rest of the night, listening to Marty and Anzl screaming curses, instructions, and other such confusing rubbish in the direction of the brawl.

Her head shot up as, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Rigel go down, his leg snagged on the fallen body of one of his dead enemies. He staggered to catch himself, but a second beast leaped; landed hard between his shoulder blades and forced him to the ground. All around, the crowd surged upwards, standing to either holler encouragement or cheer on the monsters. Rigel rushed upwards as well, in a massive heave of new energy. Tera sighed, letting out the breath she hadn't known she was holding. Despite a dazed shaking of his head, the Gladiator would be able to continue.

And continue it did, as two more waves of beasts followed, each more bloodthirsty and menacing than the last. The welling revulsion at the spectacle and the panic returned, as Tera understood that at any moment Rigel could slip, fall, and not be able to stand. It was clearly evident despite Tera's efforts to ignore it that he was tiring; he dragged his feet as he ran, and depended more and more on his booster jets to support him.

Calm came then, the rat-a-tat of gunfire ceased, and he stood as he had before, lonely in the center of the ring, as the battle introduced a catch. A ringing explosion seemed to hold itself at bay for a moment, gathering in volume and intensity before it blew out of one of the collapsible walls in a mushrooming gout of dirty fire. Hurled by a spinning girder which struck him heavily in the midriff, Rigel skidded on his back across the field, sparks skittering up from his armor as metal screeched against metal.

From where the barrier had broken, a new foe appeared, and Tera recognized it immediately. It was the same type of creature who had killed the Gladiator from last time, her dead Gladiator with the black, black hair and the gouged out eye. Dread seeped into her, dropping down to rest somewhere near her stomach and heart.

As if considering his opposition, the tired man rested his hands on his blue metal encased knees, shuddering convulsively as he took in each exhausted breath. Slowly, he pulled his chin upward, until he was staring at the monster where it crouched, mere yards away. Drawing his shotgun, he whipped it up and pulled viciously at the trigger, but was answered only by a clicking sound. The Controllers had evidently decided that it was now time for some real entertainment, and had disabled his weapon for the crowd's amusement. An almost-smile stretched jaggedly across the beast's face; it was aware of the puny man-human's lack of a weapon; knew that nothing existed beyond some magical intervention which could stop it strolling up and rending his flesh. Even the announcer had gone silent, as the crowd waited with tightly baited breath.

And then, there was the snap of jaws, the ripping hiss of metal as it struck fang. But Rigel was still there, rolling backward with silvery slashes carved into the chest of his armor. The monster grumbled to itself in a low, throaty growl of sorts, and stalked towards the Gladiator, who had quickly gathered his legs under him and was upright once more. Backed against a wall where the creature could only access his front, he crouched, both fists held clasped together as if in prayer. Perhaps it was a prayer, a plea to some unknown war god or goddess to grant a desperate human strength.

Shoving off against the barrier with a cascade of sparks from his suit-mounted jets, he cannoned fists-first into the throat of the monster. Its windpipe appeared to give; it buckled like a damp paper sack before the onslaught. Grotesque, malformed claws clutched feebly, pointlessly, at nothing. Rigel cautiously stole forward. Running more quickly now that he saw his opponent lying prone and silent on the field with only its glittering eyes and occasional twitching to prove it alive, he raised his arms again.

He prepared a second strike, a strike which would come down hard on the beast's nose and force shattered bones through nasal passages and into the fragile brain. His blow never was completed, as one of the clawed hands whipped up to seize him around the middle, and shove him hard against the floor as a sort of crutch for the monster to lean against as it pulled its legs up to support itself.

With the talons wrapped tightly about him, Rigel had no way to lower his raised fists to strike. He was wriggling like the captured people in bad horror movies, squirming against his captor's grip. The beast bent backwards slightly, bumping against the edge of the pit right next to where Tera was sitting, and causing the metal which supported all of the bleachers to rumble and shudder. Whipping its arm forward, it flung Rigel in a flailing mass towards the other side of the arena pit.

Rigel would have probably never moved again had he actually touched down and come skidding to a crunching halt at the other barrier, but fortune seemed to favor him that day and the Gladiator only bounced against a member of a new creature swarm, more of a scythe-armed type from before. Up again, he staggered crazily away from them, and unwillingly backed into a corpse and stumbled, fell. None too pleased to see its intended prey uncrushed, the monster bellowed its animosity from the other side of the pit and began its stomping trek across the field. Its legs moved in too-swift jerky motions, like a computer-animated 3D model which lacked a few key frames, as if only partially finished.

* * *

Author's Note: If you are squeamish at the mention of copious bodily fluids, AKA blood and stuff, I recommend skipping this part. There will be another author's note to let you know when it's over.

* * *

And suddenly, as if a shroud had been flung over the arena, everybody went still, sitting, crouching in mid-movement, or standing as stiff and unmoving as the ravaged bodies of fallen lab mutants. Battle pit lighting caught something, a flash of blinding bronze-gold, a burst of propulsion jet fire, and Gilgamesh's heavy frame as it struck the repulsive monster hard in its side. With a noise like that of light wooden staves clashed and then wrecked against each other, its ribs caved in, baglike belly going with them. Shining white and opaque, cracked bone stabbed through hairless oily hide, jutting out at crazy angles like harpoons hanging from the body of a dying whale while red blood stabs through ocean water.

Gilgamesh took hard hold of one of the bones, wrenching backwards into a spurt of syrupy crimson blood as he pulled downwards, tearing the ragged edge of the broken bone through skin and tightly-bunched, quivering muscles. The monster screamed, once, twice, maddened by the burning intensity of the pain as the fiery anguish seamed to burst behind its eyes. Greasy slaver swung pendulously from its clapping jaws as it pursued a series of short, suffering hops in its attacker's direction. Expertly rolling to the side, Gilgamesh effortlessly dodged the beast's flopping, useless blows which slapped meatily against the floor, sliding through the growing puddle of its own blood.

Out of range of the blind strikes, he remained still, watching the creature writhe and twist in its own gore. Bodily organs, never meant to be exposed to light, slipped juicily from inner cavities and painted the field grey and pink with their fluids. And so the golden warrior stayed, awaiting the moment when the beast died of pain, screaming until its vulture's voice went hoarse, trickling red from its maw, eyes slowly dimming, still wallowing in its own misery.

* * *

AN: Alrighty, it's over now, you can come out from behind the couch :). So, the basic gist of things is that Gilgamesh showed up and kicked some serious monster rear, killing it slowly and brutally, so it essentially died of pain and blood loss and other not-very-nice things. Yup.

* * *

The crowd could see now that the battle was over. As one, in a single concerted voice, they began roaring Gilgamesh's name, yelling it as if praising some god. Uncovering her eyes and choking back the gag reflex at the barbaric sight on the field, Tera was about to feel indignant that Gilgamesh was getting credit for the fight which Rigel had mostly finished, when she recognized the suit of armor which Gilgamesh was clad in at this very moment. And quite suddenly, without really meaning to, she let all of her indignation drain away, as she recalled when she had last seen that bronze-gold fighting shell—piled up in a ragged heap as so to let in the light of a setting sun through gashes inflicted by the very monster which was bleeding its life out before her.

Rigid with shock, she only sat there as Gilgamesh bowed towards his fans, and then, swiftly, so as not to bide too long, he turned on his heel and sprinted upfield to where Rigel was struggling with the creatures he had landed among earlier. From where she white-knuckled the arms of her chair, Tera watched, dumbfounded, as Gilgamesh swooped down upon the melee, snatching up one of the few remaining beasts and taking hold of his neck. Although he had only appeared to shake it slightly, those robot pieces he was made of worked wonders; the creature's neck and vertebrae crunched together like a spring that has been jammed in on itself too tightly. This procedure eliminated three, leaving Rigel to eventually dispatch his one with the help of a wall, and his shoulder plate, which he bludgeoned it to death with.

Still holding the bloody chunk of metal, Rigel droopingly limped up to Gilgamesh and looked up at him, the weary gaze of a defeated fighter. Tera was unsure as to how she knew this, but from his posture, she felt she had a pretty good idea. Gilgamesh majestically stuck out a hand for Rigel, who took it gingerly, lightly. Then the massive grip tightened about his fingers and palm, and Gilgamesh hoisted his smaller opponent up over his head by a tight, brutal grip on his throat. Kicking jerkily, Rigel clutched at the hands about his rubber-encased neck. His armor was working against him, collapsing inward on itself, pinching his windpipe shut in a way that constricted breathing more that Gilgamesh ever could.

And so it went on; Gilgamesh began shaking his smaller opponent, very lightly, but in the way that Rigel began to flail, even Tera (who had gained most of her knowledge of situations such as this via the Internet) could recognize that Gilgamesh was strangling him. The big Gladiator had stoked the fires of adrenaline with the crowd's enthusiasm, working himself into a killing frenzy. Rigel tucked his chin in, and went after Gilgamesh's helmet, ripping at locking machinery in a bid to tear it from his opponent's face and expose the only weak spot he could think of.

The helmet refused to budge, and Rigel's lashing about faded, slowly at first, and then, abruptly, he stopped. And just as abruptly, he planted his hands on Gilgamesh's shoulders. Four seconds later, with a flick of Rigel's wrists, the bronze-armored Gladiator lost his grip and catapulted across the field, slid into a painful crunch against a wall, and lay motionless. The screams of the audience faded, and a whispering hubbub broke out, flickering like wildfire through a pine forest in drought season. There was no explanation for this event. Did Rigel possess cybernetic limbs after all? Some new type never seen before? Whatever the case, nobody was pleased, and shouts of _boo_ quickly accelerated into a crescendo of frightening noise.

Gilgamesh stirred; propped himself up on quivery arms to face Rigel, who stood over him in the fashion of a dominant wolf putting a subordinate back in his position. Swiftly, in a flash of motion which became more of a blur, Gilgamesh lashed out towards his blue-armored adversary's crotch, hoping to gain some time, perhaps to untangle the confusing event which had just occurred. His target sidestepped; he struck only air, and his leg, having been whipped forwards, slammed with a _crunch_ against the flooring; bounced. Doubling up in pain as if it was he himself who had received his intended kick, he spat curses behind his visor.

The Controllers, recognizing the danger of the moment, and seeing that he wasn't about to get up any time soon, begun shouting to each other.

Gilgamesh rose into the air, swift and smooth, propelled by his suit's emergency boost jets as the big screens advertised and mourned his defeat. Yet suddenly, he was falling again, falling, for Rigel had leaped the unimaginable twenty feet into the air and caught him around the waist with one arm, while the other clamped across the front of Gilgamesh's helmet. The jets sputtered, and suddenly, they went out. The pair, locked together, finished their fall and hit floor hard, with Rigel's knees dug into his opponent's abdomen. Pinned, Gilgamesh flopped uselessly, weak and drained, striking at nothing the way the creature had.

Rigel scuffled to his feet and raised one hand, fingers splayed apart as if mimicking the talons of some massive bird of prey, stiff and slightly bent.

Gilgamesh watched the hand in a stupor of red-misted pain, as his world flashed, blurred, and ignited.

Tera watched with a sort of horrible fascination as Gilgamesh inexplicably caught fire; melting steel and titanium alloy dripped out around him and cooled into grey slag as it reached beyond the flames. This was a new kind of fire, white and blue and vicious, which stuck in gooey festering blobs to his body. Despite his helmet, despite all of the breathing equipment blocking his mouth, he screamed, hoarse and broken-sounding, until his voice cracked in the way that a man's voice never should, and the piercing scream of a boy tore from his throat, dying away eventually as he stopped wriggling and collapsed into a pool of molten gold-tinged armor, its color darkened by his own blood. But the only other person to hear it was Rigel, who had taken the role of David and felled Goliath with the help of some unseen force to guide him and grant him strength. The weak boy had faced the giant and proved victorious.

Turning his back on the dying man, Rigel began to run for the now-open field exit. It was a staggering, crazy sort of gait; stumbling forwards, hands nearly brushing the metal flooring. He staggered through the exit with his hands groping at nothingness as if for something which just wasn't there.

The hush across the entire stadium clamped muggy fingers over Tera's ears, prompting her to whisper in an awed voice, "What just happened?"

It was as if Alisa had been struck dumb. Her mouth moved, open, and then shut again, but no words came out. Anzl took over, half standing in his chair and growling, "Illegal plasma grenade. That's the only weapon which causes _true_ white fire." The Controllers had realized the calamity and sent out medics with reviver coils and burn equipment to haul him in, but by now it was obvious that he would need more than just metal bits to make him whole again. He would need a miracle.

"Attention," came the announcer's voice. "Attention please! Due to this…_unfortunate_ event, our schedule for the evening has been disrupted. Chemical experts will be arriving within the next fifteen minutes to sort out whether this was an illegal usage case of plasma grenades. Please remain seated until the experts leave the premises. In about one hour you will be free to leave. We are sorry for any inconvenience." Although 'nobody' is a strong word, it perfectly described exactly who was pleased by the verdict. Nobody.

"Well crud," said Tera distantly amid her friend's heated and rather put-out sounding discussion. But she remained looking forward, staring at the place where Gilgamesh had lain. He was wearing _her_ Gladiator's armor. And now he was dead. But his height didn't match, the grace didn't match, the creepy ferocity and animalistic brutality were all things that her Gladiator had never displayed during the one fight she watched. Shaking her head, she wondered why she was comparing them.

Distracted from her musings by somebody stomping noisily up the stairs, she turned to see who it was leaving when they weren't supposed to. It was Rigel, back straight now, striding purposefully away from where he had mysteriously (and brutally) maimed a man before the Controllers could intervene. As he passed just a few inches away from her, Tera caught a whiff of oil and blood. For some odd reason, he stopped, turned back to her. And for some equally odd reason, Tera bothered to look. Quite possibly, it would end up being the weirdest sensation she would ever experience. It was like the déjà vu and vertigo she had felt run through her when the group had first entered the stadium a few hours ago, except mingled with a vague sense of unease and safeness at the exact same time.

But now, with scarcely a foot separating metal-clad killer and tense onlooker, Tera had full view of those red marking on his armor, and the funny crawling feeling returned. One of them was a rose, in full bloom, shaded with deeper tones of burgundy and accented by splashes of a pale crimson. But it was the second symbol which caused the cold to crawl under her skin. An eye, deep and red and unblinking, wreathed not by dark lashes but by stocky jutting spikes. A pupil, rimmed by nothing and staring balefully at its surroundings, as if searching for something. Rigel finally finished his turn, and with only his front facing her, Tera could no longer see the marks.

Tentatively, and not completely sure of why she was doing this, Tera wiggled one hand in a sort of hesitant wave, coupled with a shy child's subdued greeting of "Hi." She said it simply, and, glad to have it out, focused on trying to think straight. The Gladiator looked startled, just in the way his head sort of jerked back. Tera could see why; on the way up the stairs many of the people had thrown whatever came to hand at him. So now, understandably, he was a little shocked to have anybody say anything that wasn't 'screw you' at him, in varying forms of the word. He seemed to consider this all in the way that a dog sniffs a ball of hamburger he has been tossed, checking to make certain that nobody has hidden a pill in it.

"Hey." He replied carefully, stiltedly, in a hiss of fog from his respirator. He inclined his head slightly, and retracted his visor. Reaching up one gauntleted hand, he brushed black hair away from his equally dark eyes, mumbling as he did so, "Do I know you?"

Anzl rushed to his feet, green eyes sparking dangerously. Rigel shook his head quickly; moved on.

Tera sank back into her seat; sank as far as she could sink into the unyielding green plastic. She just slouched there, eyes shut and heart racing, feeling weak and sluggish from astonishment. He was dead. He had _died._ Distracted by a sudden 'watched' feeling, she whipped her head around and saw Rigel staring at her from the top of the stairs. He had removed his helmet, cradling it loosely under his arm. As if it were completely normal for armor-clad Gladiators to be doing so, he quirked a smile, a very cheeky sort of 'Oh, hello again'. Strangely, none of the angry crowd members seemed to notice him.

Tera blinked, and in that very instant a curious sort of 'hum' fizzled through the air. When her eyes flicked open after their microsecond of hiding behind hooded lids, he was gone.

* * *

_This was laughter now, the crazed utterance of a man drunk on his own power._

"_Is it time?"_

_His baleful glare turned to _her_ now; although his eyes were concealed, she could feel the hate. "Feed them the flowers." _

_And for the first time, the first time in years, he rose from the cold grey throne which had held him for so long._

_She couldn't help the confused expression. It roiled up on her own face, as unable as she was to comprehend what this could mean. _

"_Misery…"_

_She took a quick step back, hearing her name._

"_It is time."_

_He tasted those words. They were the spark for the dynamite. They were what he had been waiting to say for ages._

"_I see him._

_An ominous pause. "The beacon is lit."_

* * *

Word Count: **6673**

Ok, now the italics people can no longer disclose their precious identities, for I have unmasked them!

This is the very last chapter that doesn't have very much plot to it. Glark. Hope everybody enjoyed (even if it could be a novel at this point and not a fanfiction). Thanks to anybody who bothers to review. You all get chocolate cake. With sprinkles.


	4. The Lighting of the Beacon

A Second Chance for Redemption

Apologies for how insanely long it's taken me to update…this chapter was honestly a bitch to write, I'm not exactly sure why, but it was. Also, this is probably going to be my last very long chapter. I enjoy spending large quantities of time on editing and making everything just right, which really slows down updates. Future chapters will most likely be around 2000-3000 words or so, but never less than 1500. That way, I can cater to my perfectionist tendencies, and everybody else doesn't have to wait until a day past infinity to read a new installment.

Huge thanks to **Skylark Starflower**, **TEH NUKEMAHN**, **Raynor Zeraph**, **Atravir**, and **zero9g9** for kind reviews. Feedback is always appreciated. Wait, scratch that…loved. Yes. Loved is a much better word :).

Anyhoo…on with the show!

* * *

_A Second Chance for Redemption_

A semi-original fiction

by Fusionmix

_Chapter 4_

†††

…_You, you, now I see,  
Keeping everything inside.  
With you, you, now I see,  
Even when I close my eyes._

_-"With You", Linkin Park-_

SHE CONTINUED TO STARE, eyes riveted to the spot where he had stood, until Kiara glanced over from where she was arguing intensely with the others and gave her the patented _what-is-wrong-with-you_ look. "Oh…sorry…" Tera thought blankly for an excuse to leave. "I—I need to use the restroom."

Kiara nodded slowly, very slowly. "Um…yeah, you do that, okay?" She was probably even more skeptical once Tera sprang up and, using one hand to leap over her own chair; went swiftly and urgently up the steps in the direction Rigel had taken.

Perhaps it was only to her benefit that she was currently forbidden to traverse the walkabout. It definitely made navigating easier without scads of people swarming all over the place and blocking off her view of her quarry. Ah yes, there he was, walking at a more genial pace now that he was out of the line of fire for most of the crowd. It wasn't until he entered a minute one-man elevator with 'STAFF ONLY' labeled in bold black letters on its doors that she realized how stupid this was. Leaning against the now-closed elevator doors, she pressed hands to her forehead and sighed deeply. Bracing herself, she spun on her heel and glared at the button Rigel had pressed. Punching it herself, she waited for the welcoming honk of the car

Cautiously, she half-stepped into the boxlike car, leaving one leg firmly planted on solid ground. She suddenly felt claustrophobic as the light was blocked off and something clamped around her leg. The door had shut, right on her shin. Trying to push back through the doors and get out of the elevator became impossible as the pressure increased. Panic mixed with irritation welling up inside her, Tera threw herself against the doors, and then, recognizing defeat, yanked her leg in with her, losing her sandal in the process.

Comforted by the thought that she could just go back up, she found herself shooting downwards with a speed that was most likely over the elevator descent speed limit established by the government a few years ago. Some unhealthily smart people decided to invent a magnet powered elevator which actually was capable of causing a sort of weightlessness as its rider fell. While Tera thought the idea very appealing indeed, though most people apparently couldn't stomach it, so hence, nobody was allowed to enjoy it.

The thump of the elevator car as it came to a sudden stop threw her off balance; she caught hold of a side rail and steadied herself. With a disruptive squeak, the doors opened. Although one of them stuck, Tera discovered that kicking things as seen in movies actually could repair things. Either that or she had just broken something, but nevertheless, the troublesome door jerked convulsively a few times as if having some sort of elevator seizure, before opening fully.

The hall stretched as far as Tera could see, defying the circular nature of the building to slash out in a belligerent line. She was farther underground than she had thought. The hall was narrow, not in a cozy way, but in the fashion that causes a person to feel a vague sense of panic, and wish very much to leave immediately. Although Tera had never been troubled by claustrophobia, she couldn't help suddenly scooting away from the wall to stand where she at least wasn't touching anything, and had a modicum of maneuvering room to work with in case she had to run.

The light above her flickered unevenly, halogen bulb apparently on its last legs. All down the hall, placed at five foot intervals, they succeeded in forming a series of yellowy cones of visibility, but for some reason, whether it be the dust or the general darkness of the place, they did not illuminate the walls. This did have a benefit however, for down the corridor at the opposite end Tera could make out a lonely band of dim light weakly glowing from under a much larger door. Careful to step so that her shoes made no noise, she crept towards it, heart pounding so loudly in her ears that she was sure that anybody could hear it.

Without warning, there came a loud crash from a door not too far away, and a light came on; she flattened herself against a wall as a muttered argument broke out and more smashing sounds followed. A fight? Tera shut her eyes and willed herself to stop breathing so loudly.

A half-dressed man wearing only a pair of hacked-off jeans stuck his bald head out. Offhandedly scooping up a length of bent piping, he looked it over and hurled it to the ground. "…not going t' work. Any better ideas?"

A second man, who loosely dangled a crowbar from one hand, strode confidently up to stand at the first one's side. "Not exactly." The narrow hall with its cold cement walls worked like a sort of amplifier, taking their conversation directly to Tera's ears. This could work against her as well, she realized, and redoubled her already paranoid efforts to remain silent.

Both of the men trod slouchingly down the hall, the larger soundless on bare feet, the other clumping awkwardly in heavy boots. They both stopped short before the massive door at the end of the tunnel. The crowbar-wielding one dropped his tool to the floor and inspected the contents of the raggedy backpack he had been lugging. "Derek, what'd you do with the torch? I left it right in here…"

"Stop your whining," the shirtless one, Derek, removed the unlit cigarette from his mouth and motioned towards his accomplice. "Do you still got that lighter?"

After a cursory look-over of his pockets, the second one shrugged. On impulse, he snapped his fingers. The sound echoed coldly down the corridor. "I left the torch in the room." His voice no longer seemed as soft, and Tera could make out his accent. "Go fetch it, will you." Although faint, it was undoubtedly British.

As his bald companion stepped away from the wall and back into the cone of light emanating from the room, light glinted over the bigger man's upper body; light which flashed over silvery uncovered metal.

Gladiators. Tera had just, in her own stupidity, stumbled right into the dorm rooms for a bunch of most likely rowdy men. She began edging backwards towards the elevator, and inadvertently knocked her elbow into a button on its control panel.

"Access denied," came a female monotone. "Please insert staff passkey, or contact an overseer for assistance."

Tera squinted her eyes shut. "Crap," she breathed, as the cold feminine voice finished echoing down the hallway.

The man with the backpack froze before stepping fully into the dusty cones of yellowish light, away from the pack. "How did you get down here?" he snapped, in a tone more of surprise than of hostility.

Without bothering to answer, she made a scramble for the elevator and stepped hastily in. Tera braced herself for the jerk she knew was coming.

Except that it didn't.

The dull tapping of his booted feet across the concrete echoed through the corridor.

Clumsily functioning on frightened instinct, she tapped the 'close doors' button, and released a breath she hadn't known she was holding. It was only then that she noticed the silver print on the control panel.

"One way," she read it to herself in a whisper. Whose effing bright idea was it to build a one-way elevator?

That crowbar forced its way through the door, buckling the metal as if it were a sheet of aluminum foil. A pair of long-fingered hands followed, and proceeded to bend the edges of the doors, one centimeter at a time. As the Gladiator grumbled triumphantly to himself and inserted the crowbar again, Tera was momentarily tempted to grab the tool and try to pull it through the gap towards her, but the man on the other side would probably just yank her against the door instead.

She pressed herself against the elevator wall as the crowbar receded once more and a hand was thrust through again, scrabbling for the 'open door' button, but located the 'up' instead. Repeatedly, the crooked index finger hammered at the button, unaware (or perhaps in denial) of how useless the action was. Plastic casing cracked, and then gave in and shattered into brittle yellowish fragments.

Muttering filtered in from the hall. The arm withdrew.

"I'm looking for a Gladiator!" Tera began desperately, shouting through the crack. "He's called Rigel!"

All activity on the opposite side of the elevator door ceased. Tera's heart soared for a moment, before it realized that internal organs are not designed to fly and sank back into its regular place as the Gladiator shoved his arms through once more.

A hint of an idea tugged at the edge of Tera's mind, jerking at the rug her panicked insides cringed on. Leaned against the corner of the elevator cab's interior was a length of rusty iron piping. Hefting the pipe and turning towards her target, she waited until the hands had a good grip on the doors, before she brought her burden forward. An acute and very unique crunching noise filled the air, followed by a sharp gasp. Tera's stomach cringed. The Gladiator struggled to pull his arms out of the gap, just as Tera rammed her makeshift weapon home again, mentally sealing her ears. She missed, however, denting the doors. Like some sort of medieval battering ram, he thrust his entire self against the space between, succeeding in grabbing one wrist.

He twisted; she dropped her weapon, and tried to squirm free. Panic welled up in her throat as thoughts of what he might do to her if she did not escape filled her head with looming and unpleasant images. A second hand snatched for her other arm; his beaky-nosed angular face appeared in the gap. She kicked upward, aiming at his nose, but skipped hitting anything altogether.

The Gladiator gave one last tremendous shove forwards; the tendons in his neck stood out like cables before he bent the already-rickety elevator door right out of alignment. "Now!" he stated loudly. "Could we please refrain from trying to smash any more fingers, thank you very much?"

"Wait," came another voice, Derek's, steadier and deeper-toned. "What're you doing?"

The British man loosened his grip on Tera's arm, but refrained from answering the actual question, obviously not wanting to admit that he had been injured by a female. "A girl showed up down here," he grumbled, and his grip loosened even more. "She tried to get out by the lift."

"Good thing you got her, then." He grinned, a slow, spreading expression which radiated familiarity. He shifted his attention to Tera before he spoke again. "Miss, you can't get out that way. We've tried. Even if we manage to get around the override code, you still need the ID card."

Tera was released altogether; a rough flick of her captor's wrist sent her sprawling backwards. She smelled iron; it was the blood from his smashed finger which had dripped across her arm. Feeling thankful for her already-ruined jeans, she wiped her wrist off, leaving another brownish stain.

Tera regarded the man from where she sat. Remembering that he could spring on her at any moment, she scrambled as gracefully as possible to her feet, slipping twice on the dirty grate which served as the flooring in front of the elevator. "I followed Rigel down." She preferred to leave out the part about getting her leg stuck; it had been morbidly stupid of her.

His grey eyes narrowed, and a few suspicious lines traced their way across his face. "You know him?"

"Well, I _did_, and so…"

She would have finished her explanation, but the lanky man had quickly glanced upwards. Some of his messy brown hair flopped over his eyes; he swiped it away as though in a trance. "Quiet!" he hissed in a hoarse whisper.

Tera fidgeted, only to receive a hard stare. "Screaming," growled Derek. "You okay?"

Feeling awkwardly at her bruised arm, she mumbled, "Yeah…I mean, yes, sure, I'm fine."

Stopping her before she could say any more, the other man, the English one, waved his hand to catch her attention. "If the bent door wasn't jamming it, would the lift work?" His voice was urgent, low-pitched and dangerous.

"I don't think it's broken, no."

"Are you sure?"

Tera nodded, unsure of why he was asking if he already knew the lift only went one way.

"Derek, I need the torch now. Try and see if Shawn's awake while you're at it." He watched the much taller bald man skulk off. Tera was busy wondering how he would listen to the gangly Gladiator she had been speaking to, but her thoughts were interrupted by a jab in the ribs. "Oh, and I'm Chris. You are?"

"Tera," she said dumbly, before Chris fumbled a lighter out of his pocket.

"You need to be more careful," Chris's voice was slightly muffled as his back was turned to her. "Why'd you follow Rigel down anyway?" He licked a finger and rubbed it against a thoroughly cobweb-infested panel near the elevator.

"Well..." She was unsure of what to say to this man who just five minutes ago had been gripping her wrists brutally enough to snap them, had he held on any tighter. Tera rubbed one as she thought of something more intelligent to say. "This might sound sort of messed up, but I saw him a year ago, and—and…" Her voice died away. "Do you know how he beat Gilgamesh?"

Chris whipped away from whatever he had been struggling with to fix her with a piercing glare which could function as an acetylene torch were it any more intense. "He did what."

"Beat Gilgamesh. He was losing! Completely losing, and then he goes and flings Gilgamesh across the place and sets him on fire." Recalling the event, Tera's awkwardness temporarily vanished.

He stroked his chin, where a bristly forest of dark stubble cultivated itself. "Ah."

"This has happened before, then."

"Sor' of, yes."

"He looked normal when I saw him. Rigel I mean." Although it could not be said that she was exactly _comfortable_ around Chris, she felt that keeping silent would only betray her nervousness.

He grunted in reply, still altogether occupied with squinting through the meager glow the lighter could provide on the now semi-clean shadow-shrouded panel near the elevator. "Well that's good," he said in a stilted, concentration-slowed tone, "Because if we're going to get out, and get you out while we're at it," A spitting noise, and a piece of wire hit the floor. "We'll need his help, dubious though it might be."

With a curse, Chris dropped the lighter and blew on a scorched finger. Like a drop of food coloring in a glass of water, the heavy scent of lighter fluid was beginning to permeate the airless space around them. Tera coughed. "Last time," Chris continued, voice sounding rather mumbly since his burnt finger was still stuck in his mouth, "The whole facility shut down for a week, just trying to figure out what happened. It'll probably happen again, so half of our plan just fell to pieces right there."

"A plan?"

"Of escape. Shawn—that's Rigel—and I were due to fight next; we were hoping to stage me losing. I'd hold one of the Controllers hostage and demand that we be released. When they opened the lower doors, Derek would jam them with something."

Tera digested this information slowly. Wonderful, she was assisting in an escape effort, just the thing she'd always wanted to do. Fantastic even. "Why did you want to escape?"

He stopped, suddenly, and fixed her with an expression of confusion. "We're gladiators. Slaves. The fact that this is the 22nd Century does little to change any of that."

"Like in Rome?" Tera asked in a weak little voice.

"Yup. Bright girl. Exactly like that, actually. I suppose the media makes us all out to be rich and famous movie stars?" Mouth still twisted in his ugly expression of sarcasm, he turned back to his job and said crossly, "Why am I even telling you this."

She sucked in her breath. "My god, I'm sorry!" With a pit in her stomach as if she had been punched, she leaned against the wall beside, but not too close to the man as he hunched over whatever he was working on. The metallic implants were prosthetics, not...and Marty wanted to be a Gladiator...and they were slaves. "I had no idea—I mean, I never knew, it's like…." She stopped, unable to go on, and dropped her gaze to her dust-powdered sandals.

He gave her a grim smile, which held no mirth. "Nobody gets told anything. You want to know something, find it out for yourself."

Acting on this, Tera stared at the open wall panel, trying to judge the purpose of the various wires which jutted out at all angles. Technology wasn't her thing. That was more up Kax's alley.

The hasty heartbeat of running feet, and then Derek returned, skidding to a stop and holding out a battered silver flashlight to Chris. The latter accepted it eagerly, and set to work trying to disassemble it. "Did you find Shawn?"

"No. Think he might've left?"

"How could he leave?" Chris spat, straightening up and gesturing towards the heavily reinforced steel hatch at the far end of the hallway. "Unless he has some sort of magical codebreaker, he can't open the door any more than we can. Is his dog still here?"

"Yeah. It was watching me when I went in to check."

Chris stretched his back thoughtfully, and sucked on his singed finger. "Tera,"

"Yes?" She hoped he wasn't going to ask her to do something rash.

"You said that you know Shawn, right?" Chris's grey eyes were hard and solemn as the words left his mouth. He looked to be around his late thirties.

"Shawn? Oh, Rigel, yes."

"I'm busy trying to divert the power from the lights to the lift to override it. Something's going on aboveground, and it's the perfect chance to get us—you out of here. I've no time to go try and get Shawn. I need you to go and find him before the lights die."

Bewildered, Tera tried to hide her expression by nodding, but asked, "Didn't Derek just do that?"

Mind whirling, Tera was sorely tempted to inquire as to what exactly was going on, when the cold feminine computer voice which had given her away earlier spoke up: "All contestants, please return to your rooms. All upcoming events have been cancelled due to unexplained circumstances. Do not attempt to utilize the elevator. A staff member will arrive shortly to escort you to safety.

Both Derek and Chris froze, and for a moment, their shocked expressions seemed comical. Chris slowly sank against the wall, and slid down it. The fabric of his burgundy t-shirt snagged on the rough cinderblocks, yet he continued, until he was sitting on the filthy ground. On the other hand, Derek screamed something in what sounded like, but probably was not another language, and kicked the elevator's console, hard, foot connecting with a satisfying _CLANG_ to the metal.

Chris's face was pale, and only now could Tera see the despair etched in worry-lines across his forehead. "Something's really gone wrong now. Six doors down, the one on the left. Go!" She recalculated his apparent age, coming up with early forties. Suddenly processing what he had just ordered, she turned and darted up the passage.

She whipped through the doorway Chris had indicated—_Six down, not five, six—_and stood for a moment, panting from adrenaline and taking in her surroundings. Looming low over her head, the oppressive ceiling stretched in a dead grayish tint until it came to another cinderblock wall, where it merged with peeling bluish paint against a plywood barrier and sagged downwards in several places. _This is how the Gladiators live?_ Tera thought with revulsion, stepping around a puddle of equally dirty liquid which could have been water or some form of molding drink. The previous theory was confirmed when a shallow _plink_ allowed a lonely grey water droplet to fall from the sagging ceiling into the pool.

Other than the mournful plop, and the unheard whisper of ripples in the puddle, no sound disturbed the depressing atmosphere of the room. She briefly wondered what the meaning was of Chris's words, and where exactly Shawn was, when a sharp yapping cut through her thoughts.

A dog was linked with a rusty chain to a bent nail jutting out from the wooden partitions that served as barriers between rooms. He (for it was a male) lunged forward against his chain, scrabbling with his paws as if to clutch onto air itself and pull forward against nothingness. Creamy-white fur.

Tera took both a sharp breath, and a hasty step backwards. The highway dog. How had he managed to get all the way here? There was no doubt that this little creature had been on the road just a few hours prior to now; he even wore the same green collar.

He had stopped barking, and was wiggling happily from a half-sit as she cautiously approached. "Nice doggy," Tera crooned, holding out a limp, as-unthreatening-as-possible hand to the blunt, whiskery muzzle. The dog barely reached to her knees when she bent to slowly pat his neck and shoulders, careful not to startle him.

"You've met Mick then, I see," came a sudden voice from behind her. "He likes you."

She whirled about for what felt like the umpteenth time that evening, nearly falling over in the process. Rigel had propped himself up on his elbows from where he had been lying unseen on the cot in the corner of the room. He had discarded his armor, apparently, exchanging it for a plain sleeveless tee and jeans. From the condition of the shirt, he might have been wearing it underneath the armor. "Oh…sorry," Tera mumbled, backing up and almost tripping again. "I—Chris told me to find you."

He let himself fall backwards and let out a deep, ragged sigh. Seeing this, Tera continued, "Derek went looking for you already, but he said you weren't here."

Rigel, or Shawn, as he should probably be called, smiled. "I was here, but I wasn't ready to wake up yet. I didn't need Baldy to find me, so he didn't." Still smiling disarmingly, he swung his legs over the side of the cot and pushed himself off of it. He staggered; caught hold of the head-bars to keep from collapsing. "What happened?"

"You won." Tera bit her tongue, but she had already said it. No taking it back.

His face contorted in pain as he clasped a hand to his pale forehead. "So I did." His black hair, which had obviously been spiked up at some point with gel, now lay in a sort of rats' nest against his head, all except for a large tuft in the front, which flopped down to his eyes.

Tera took a hesitant pace forward. "Are you alright?"

Shawn waved her away, and wobbled again to his feet. "Yes," he gritted, before nearly toppling over. "No, I'm not, but at this point, it looks as if I'll just have to make the best of it, hmm?" He smiled again, and his voice seemed surer. "Anyhoo…" He paused. "I do know you!" Seeming to forget his infirmity, he grinned insanely. "You were there last year before I died!"

The way he said it made it sound like a fairly regular occurrence. "You died."

"Yeah, sorry, we can get reacquainted later. You're Tera, right? Right. What's going on?"

"The lights are turning off in a couple of minutes, we aren't allowed to go anyplace, Chris and Derek are acting like the world's coming to an end, and a staff member is supposedly coming down to 'escort us to safety'." She made a mocking quotes-motion in the air with her fingers.

As she said this, Shawn's confident expression melted from his face. "Sure. Once we're all _dead_, yeah, then the staff member comes down and drags to bodies to safety—where we never get seen or heard of again." Noting Tera's confused appearance, he held up a hand to stop her from speaking as he bent and then straightened again, extending his arms high above his head as he stretched. "Well then." He trotted out into the corridor.

"Unhook Mick, will you, and bring him out here. He won't bite."

Tera bobbed her head in acknowledgement of Shawn's order, realized he couldn't see her, and was about to shout out something along the lines of 'Got it', when he called back, "Good. If the chain jams, get angry at it. That usually works." His voice was slightly echoed, as he was speaking from further down the hall.

Tera complied numbly, fumbling at the primitive clip, which, fortunately for her clumsy fingers, kindly refrained from jamming. It was just as well, for at that moment, the room darkened. Groping along the wall, still holding Mick's chain, she tripped on something, again, and barely managed to avert her fall by clutching the edge of a bookcase. _Everybody's falling down,_ she thought to herself, mimicking a phase she and a friend had so often shouted while watching Saturday-morning cartoons a decade ago.

Only the glowing orange-yellow orbs of Mick's eyes marked where the door was, but a faint gleam was slowly fading into visibility. Chris had given up on whatever he had been doing to the poor flashlight, and was utilizing it like a normal person. "Come on," he gruffly stated, shining the light into Tera's face as she exited. He quickly jerked the beam away. "Sorry about that."

Derek appeared behind him; Tera gingerly brushed past the towering bald man to leave the room. "Why not just go out the emergency elevator hatch thing if we're stuck here? That's what I was trying…" She trailed off, remembering that Derek had said that the lift only went one way for the occupants of the passageway.

"The screaming's going again," Chris whispered.

"Warning. This level is now under Orange Level Quarantine. Do not attempt to utilize the lift or exit. Please remain where you are until a staff member arrives to escort you to safety." The ridiculously calm voice of the computer added more stress to the already strained atmosphere.

Derek kicked the console again. "They're just goin' to leave us!"

"Pretty much," Chris nodded, speaking in a light bantering tone even though his face was grim. "The minute the alert level hits red, we don't have to worry about this anymore."

Tera shook her head, inching closer to the three men, wary but too curious to keep away from the conversation. "What do you mean?"

Chris, who apparently was the self-appointed spokesperson for the group, idly jiggled the more damaged of the broken lift doors. "Screaming equals bad things happening. Quarantine equals we're stuck here. Elementary enough for you?"

Ignoring the insult, Tera nodded, plastered a goofy smile on her face, and added sarcastically, "Wonderful explanation. You should become a college professor."

"How should you know; you ever _been_ to college?" Chris's lip curled in disgust. "Shut up and let me concentrate." He turned back to the elevator, looking up and squinting in infuriated concentration at the emergency hatch. "Derek, see if you can get the casing off the console."

Shawn stared pointedly at Tera until he caught her eye, then looked away and said shortly and quietly, "He's afraid. Unless we get a way out of here and convince somebody to unlock our wristbands for us, we're proverbial toast." A distant glow came into his eyes. "Toast is good, but not when you're it."

"Is that some sort of restraint?" Tera posed the question as innocently as she could, trying not to sound like a complete ignoramus. This really was _not_ the sort of situation she wanted to be in at the moment.

Shawn held out his arm. The pale light of the halogen bulbs caught an impossibly thin band of metal around his wrist. "They interact with your implants, meaning the metal in you, and when the going gets tough, the Controllers decide to push the button, and this little device tells all the robot bits in you to explode." He made a flower-like gesture with both hands. "Poof."

"Do you have it also? The metal parts, I mean."

He shook his head. "Nope. No metal in me. I'm safe. But they," he said, pointing first to Derek, then to Chris, "have steel _and_ plastic. So unless somebody can get the bands off of them, they're pretty much screwed as soon as the Controllers hit the panic button. If they try to remove the bands themselves, the bands go ahead and skip the entire 'push the panic button' phase."

"Wait, plastic?"

He pointed to Chris again, and pulled a wry face. "Artificial lungs."

"Oh." She decided not to ask any further into the matter. "Why can't I get the bands off for you? Since I don't have to stay down here, I could-"

Cutting her off for the second time in a few minutes, Shawn beamed her a wide grin. "I'd ask you to, but there isn't an alloy on earth that can cut this stuff."

"Then how do they get them off?"

"We get issued with them when we first 'arrive'." He made quotes in the air to indicate sarcasm. "They don't come off."

"Not even once you're dead," added Chris darkly from his corner.

"Oh." she said again. And once more, she decided not to press too hard.

Then again, she wouldn't really have had time to pressure the topic, for at this moment, what sounded like a shout rang out aboveground. Derek quirked a bushy eyebrow, and Chris's forehead wrinkled up in confusion. Shawn's mouth became a lopsided 'o'.

Tera turned towards him. "Did somebody just say 'huzzah'?"

It was at precisely that moment that the entire tunnel shook, and one end of the ceiling quivered futilely before, in a screech of protesting stone, it collapsed, obliterating the elevator, the console, and that end of the passageway altogether.

Naturally, this was the worst possibly time for Tera's phone to start ringing.

* * *

I just realized that we didn't have any conversation involving Misery and the Doc…very sorry that it's still not that fanficcy, but I actually had a nice and happy (well…not that happy…violent maybe?) fight scene here which involved…things that are fanficcy. Sadly, this chapter had made it to 7000+ words and I decided that it was getting too long. However, anybody who's played Cave Story knows what's going to happen following the amazing and wonderful "Huzzah!"

The next chapter may be a little slow in coming, since I need to adjust my writing style a little bit. In fact, I'm not even sure I like this chapter. I may take it down and edit it again, but I at least don't hate it like I did chappy 2. I have chapter 5 all planned out, and in 6 the plot will be making a major transition (largely original to lots-of-Cave-Story-stuff), so it will take me a while to write it. And in case anybody wants a teaser…somebody dies next installment. I haven't decided who, but a lot of characters will be exiting the story, and one or two will be exiting life. I'm so cruel and heartless.

For anybody who though the getting stuck in the elevator bit was stupid, I'll have you know that both my brother and I have had the same thing happen to us. Twice to me actually. I tend to learn some things slowly. It was in a hospital, and you'd think the doors would close slowly for all the wheelchairs and old people, but if hospital elevators close quickly, a run-down one in an arena would probably be a lot easier to get stuck in. Eh, never mind.

Word Count: **5694**


	5. Even Heroes Know When To Be Scared

A Second Chance for Redemption

Where do I begin? I was gone for forever, and only managed to write a single chapter while I was gone. Ah well. However, anybody who looks back over the other chapters might notice some slight changes now. I'm finally going back and making some slight polishing touches to everything, and fixing some small inconsistencies.

But yes, this chapter FINALLY takes them all out of that stupid Arena. I know I spent waaaaay too much time there, but now I've got the story back on track and have the rest of everything planned out in my plot notebook (which I've managed not to lose this time). So, without any further ado, the fifth chapter of A Second Chance for Redemption. Enjoy!

* * *

_A Second Chance for Redemption_

A semi-original fiction

by Fusionmix

_Chapter 5_

†††

_Slip out the back _

_Before they know you were there,_

_At the worst,_

_you'll see nobody cares…_

_-"Slip Out the Back", Fort Minor-_

In the midst of the upheaval in the rubble-choked corridor, a tinny, pale sound interrupted the cacophony of crumbling cinderblocks, and the groaning protestations of mangled wood. Tera Ankiel's cellular phone jangled a cheerful and entirely atmosphere-disturbing tune. Chris turned his dust-powdered face up from where he stood doubled over in a coughing fit as his artificial lungs struggled to understand what had just occurred and purge themselves of grit. "What the hell was that?" he forced out between half-retching expulsions of air.

Given the current state of affairs, one could not help but wonder if it was the unexpected collapse of most of the hallway which begged this question, or the irritating jingle of the phone. Not bothering to answer him, Tera fumbled in her pocket for the offending object and flipped it open, even as something stirred in the pile of stone and ruined architecture. "Hello?"

Kiara's panicked voice stabbed into Tera's already explosion-tender eardrums. "Oh my god! Tera! Are you all right? Something's wrong up here, and part of the building just caved in!"

Something's wrong. Understatement of the year. "I'm fine," Tera replied, shouting over the buzzing which drummed delightedly on the inside of her head. "I'm stuck down in this tunnel thing, with some Gladiators. The lift is blocked off." She winced, hoping fervently that Kiara would refrain from flying into one of her horrified tizzies. Hastily, she supplemented with, "They're helping me try and get out."

This addition did nothing to aid in preventing Kiara's imminent outburst. "You're what?" she shrieked. On the other side of the corridor, Shawn quirked an eyebrow in Tera's direction, but said nothing. "Of all the places you could go, you decided to follow some _stupid_ Gladiator into some _stupid_ tunnel and let the entire _stupid_ thing collapse on your _stupid_ head?" Her voice accomplished the difficult undertaking of managing to sound both terrified and infuriated at the exact same time.

Something underneath the mountain of debris shifted; a roughly Manhattan-sized slab of sheetrock and cement creaked, teetered, and slid down the heap in a spray of grey and brown dry filth and a wretched groan. While the hunk of wreckage missed the four people grouped in the narrow hallway, the exhaustive poof of dust did not. Thoroughly coated in a second layer of dirt, Tera spent the next few moments sneezing and trying to more comprehensively explain the situation to Kiara, while at the same time backing away from the rubble mound. It appeared to be moving.

"Kiara, look, I really have to go. I'll be fine, trust me, there's just a…there's a…." She trailed off, watching as the mountain seemed to shrink, crumpling downwards as if in a sagging sigh. "Bye," she decided quickly, and snapped the phone shut, sliding it swiftly into her pocket.

The debris heap abruptly shot apart; the best way to describe it would be to reference an Olympic gymnast who has just completed a flawless routine, and flings their arms out in triumph to illustrate their pleasure at success. Indeed, the piles of ruined cinderblock and concrete jetted away from each other in a minor explosion; Chris was flung backwards by a small spinning girder and sent Derek into an ungainly sprawl as the latter attempted to impede Chris's progress towards a painful appointment with the wall. It was this subconscious desire to save a friend's life which saved Derek's own, for moments later a rectangular, greenish behemoth fired itself from the ruins of the pile and blasted straight past the two men, crashing through the space they had previously occupied with a deep-throated, comical-were-it-not-such-a-dangerous-situation bellow of, "Huzzah!"

The thing dug its stubby orange-tinted limbs into the pavement of the flooring and skidded to a halt further down the passageway, before whirling around. By now, Derek and Chris had managed to snatch up chunks of broken cement or lengths of splintered wood to serve as makeshift weaponry, and advised Shawn urgently to do the same. Entirely frozen in place, the younger man stared at the creature, which was imprecisely toaster-shaped with two large, round, dish-like black eyes set in tan bars on its face. It wasn't until it began stomping forward with frightening rapidity that the Gladiator leaped back as if stung and scuttled to pick up his own bludgeon. He selected a jagged fragment of a split pipe with a sharp, hooked tip, and not a moment too soon, for the monster raised itself up into the musty air, undersized wings flapping at ridiculous speed. Shawn dodged around it and practically dragged Mick back into the room he had come from.

It reminded Tera a bit of a bumblebee, just before its eyes went white, its mouth twisted into a soundless shout, and a barrage of missiles erupted away from out of it, suspended motionless for a few long nanoseconds before screaming forward

Half of them struck the remains of the debris heap, and the rest narrowly skipped turning Tera into mincemeat as Shawn seized her by the arm and jerked her out of the way. As if God had pressed a button on his great heavenly stopwatch, time itself slowed; ceased; the toaster-creature dropped back to the ground, and time resumed.

The tremors shook the corridor, vast clusters and splintered shards of ruined ceiling shivered their way free and crumbled around the four humans. Chris's head shot out from the protective covering of his arms and he shouted over the echoing rumbles, "The entire place is going to come down!"

Derek dodged another of the monster's charge attacks and whacked its side as it passed, to no effect. "Good thing too, might bury this thing alive!"

Chris laughed, the crude sound of a man who knows he is about to die, but only slapped Derek's metal-clad self on the shoulder as way of response.

Watching this exchange and scrambling for a weapon of her own, Tera was disturbed by another irritating tune squawking its screechy way out of her phone. Quickly checking the screen of her cell, she called in answer to Chris's interested glance, "It's my brother!"

He reached over and snatched the phone with no warning, calloused fingers fumbling with it while he crouched beneath the dubious shelter of a stony outcropping jutting from the ruined wall. "Listen," he shouting into it. Suddenly realizing he had no idea what this brother-of-Tera's name was, he hastily jerked the cell phone down to spare its glowing square a cursory glance. Returning it to his ear, he added, "Callix."

Shawn gave him a look which plainly told him this was not the time to be conversing with somebody. He hefted his pipe and stabbed threateningly in the creature's general direction with it, while he turned back to yell something unintelligible which was lost in the scorching roar as the monster released a gout of blobby bluish flame.

Eyes narrowed from understandable stress and irritation, Chris scrambled out of the way, still babbling into the phone. "Yes, Kax, that's brilliant, now shut up and listen to me!" He tossed a stray block of concrete at the beast to distract it. "You what? Never mind that, your sister is fine. She's right here, right now..." He paused to listen, and his face darkened with exasperation. "...no, this is _not _a bloody ransom notice!"

Tera rolled her eyes from where Derek had directed her to seek refuge in a concealed corner. Why couldn't Kax just close his rambling mouth and be reasonable for once? "Can I—" she began, hoping Kax might listen to her. Chris didn't hear.

"Why? _Why_? We're stuck in the basement level of the damned Arena with…" he trailed off, cerulean fire scorching inches away from him. "Now call somebody and tell them that before it doesn't matter anymore." Wearing a facial expression which could prompt the entirety of the universe to spontaneously implode, Chris sputtered, "I said she was _fine_. The north wing of the building is collapsing, and…." He scooted out of the way of a stream of fire. "Fine, here, talk to her if you're so worried." He tossed the phone to Tera, who wasn't ready to catch it, and the slim cell clattered to the floor, promptly ceasing to operate as it was crushed underfoot. The creature hopped slightly as its foot received a mild, but still painful, jolt of electricity, and whirled about, as if startled that something had managed to harm it.

Even as Tera stared at the dead, squashed remains of her phone in dismay, the beast turned its hulking, square self to face her. In a short, harsh swiping motion, it flung her makeshift rubble shelter across the hallway and raised a stubby wing/arm for another strike. With a squeak of surprise, Tera rolled out of the way and scrambled hastily to her feet, pride at her very action-hero-esque move mingled with adrenaline and panic. "It doesn't like electricity!" she shouted into Shawn's face, heedless of how nervous of the men she had been only minutes before. "Don't you have one of the guns down here?"

The young man shook his head rapidly, prompting his already disheveled mop of black hair to stick out in all directions like the arms of the Scarecrow from _The Wizard of Oz_. "No, the guns only work inside the Pit, and we aren't allowed to have any weapons down here."

"The elevator," Tera replied, as Chris caromed his crowbar off of the monster's broad back. "Couldn't we reroute the power or something and shock it?"

She never should have thought of that stupid movie. One of the songs from _Oz_ had currently decided quite of its own nefarious accord to run at an infuriating state of repeat throughout the passages of her mind, and she had to think very hard about their current dire situation to make it shut up.

Shawn looked at her with a new sense of respect. "We could, if the cables weren't buried."

"Right." Edging away from the central conflict towards the colossal mass of twisted debris, Tera pensively chewed at a fingernail, realized what she was doing, and stopped. Helpfully, she began pawing through the rubble, even as the creature ceased in its movement and waved its stumpy arm-like appendages frantically. With a silent scream, eyes rolled back and mouth yawning open, the beast crouched as best it could with such short legs and shot upwards, slamming through the hole it had created on the way down.

And then—all was silent, save for the ringing in the four humans' ears. Dim, inconsistent light from the widened hole through the levels of the Arena filtered weakly downward, choked out in the more prevalent glow of the halogen bulbs. Finding themselves no longer hindered by several dozen feet of rubble, the sounds from above leaped down the hole, meeting the ears of the people in the corridor with the loud and confusing babble of a crowd that is angry, afraid, and above all, confused. The discordant, authoritative strains of security officers rose dimly over the waves of noise, and then were drowned out again and pulled under in the riptide of rising panic.

* * *

­­­­­­­­

_Impatience. "Have you breached the tunnels?"_

_He shifts uneasily, his great bulk unsuited to the movement. "And broke those big cages with the monsters in them, just like you told me. And I didn't say anything. Those humans are tough. They're like that little ro—"_

_Anger. "I take it that you mean that for a yes?"_

"_Yeah…I mean, yes."_

"_Good." She strides away, an example of an evanescing shadow as she passes under a ray of misplaced light and vanishes._

_It is with trepidation that she enters the throne room and awaits the attention of her master. "My lord?"_

_She cannot tell if he is listening or not, his figure is still obscured by trailing vines of brilliant green and blooms of crimson. _

_But now a rattling breath stirs the glossy green leaves, and the man she fears emerges into a halo of scarlet. "Balrog has breached the tunnels," he whispers with satisfaction. "Now it is time to send in the troops." He gives her an inquisitive, almost benevolent glance. "That _is_ what they say on the Surface, isn't it?"_

_His claw-like limbs thrust out from his sides as a number of rotting, skeletal corpses are devoured by swarming red motes of glowing light, and disappear. _

_And, like some wizened wolf, he turns his head skyward and laughs._

* * *

Chris stalked past each of his companions, glancing them quickly over in a cursory excuse for 'injury inspection'. Derek chuckled. "It's gone. It gave up!"

The Englishman whipped around and jabbed a finger into the other Gladiator's face. "But why'd it leave, eh? Why? It had the upper hand and everything. So it goes ahead and disappears. Why would it do that?"

Nobody stirred, as this sank in.

Nobody stirred as the throbbing hum reemerged, filling the corridor with a fine veil of crimson which smelled vaguely of ozone, and nothing more.

Nobody said anything as the swarming light particles wiped into reality three mangled specimens of what could once be called life. Cautiously, Tera crept up to one, stopped five feet away from it and inspected it. "Looks like roadkill," observed Derek dryly, jabbing at one of them with the pipe which had previously belonged to Shawn. The body did not move. "Whatever it is, it's pretty dead."

Shawn stared, and suddenly dropped to his knees in front of one of the filthy piles of bone and patchy, mud-crusted white fur. Moldering brown sockets which once held eyes stared back at him from the emaciated, half-decayed head of the corpse. Braving the stink, he bent close to the face of the dead creature and ran a tentative finger over the raised purplish scar on its muzzle. He whispered something which Tera could not make out, before slowly, haltingly, getting back to his feet. "Is it a dog?" she asked, voice a mingling of trepidation and curiosity. The stench had slapped her viciously in the face the moment she tried to get close enough to investigate for herself

The Gladiator shrugged. "No."

"Cat?"

"Too big."

"Then…what?" She watched him quizzically.

He probably would have answered. In fact, Tera was positive that his mouth had opened to do so, when the nearest body, the one he had been ruminating over, suddenly screamed. Surrounded and partially obscured by a buzzing cloud of the red motes of terrible light, the dead _thing_ reared up; fixed sightless, nonexistent eyes on Shawn; and stretched out. In a gruesome crackling of shifting bone and grotesque rustle of rapidly growing hair, it quivered and shot up five or six times its puny height, taking the towering form of a tatty-furred behemoth. Nearby, its comrades whined and performed the same, whimpering as their bodies were callously subjected by unknown forces to the violent changes. Curved, blackened teeth shot from bleeding, half-rotted gums; muscles knotted and bunched up underneath skin as matted carpets of whitish pelt burst up and draped about the creature's twisted frame like curtains subjected to an army of crazed cats.

Long, four-jointed arms tipped with twelve-inch claws scrabbled experimentally at the dust powdered, filthy basement flooring, right before their owner released an unearthly, guttural snarl and made a shambling, lurching lunge forward. Shawn had only about three seconds to bend backwards in an attempt to evade the first swipe, but the successive blows which would have removed his head were stopped with a bony thud as Derek charged in flailing the pipe. The beast with the scar on its muzzle yelped gruffly and ducked away from the barrage, grimy hair making a slithery sound as it cautiously retreated, its equally repulsive brethren with it.

What appeared to the four people in the passageway to be a retreat actually took the form of a carefully-masked inspection. The threat levels of the humans were assessed, analyzed, and then acted upon, which goes to say that the three animals charged en masse.

Though she had been partially bolstered by adrenaline during the confusing encounter with the square-shaped beast, Tera now discovered that the underlying emotions, tired of being suppressed, currently began forcing themselves to the forefront of her mind. Were she less well-versed in the art of concealing her feelings, she probably would have started screaming and running around vainly searching for some desperate shelter.

As it went, she left off the screaming and probed frantically with her eyes for some way past the creatures. Finding an almost-three-foot gap between the rear of one of the monsters and the wall, Tera galvanized herself into action, unceremoniously fell over due to suddenly-wobbly legs, and sprawled forward to the floor. Mentally cursing her jelly-legs, she pushed herself to her feet, and her fear to the back of her mind. Too quickly, and she let out a hoarse gasp of pain and stared, horrified, at the now-mangled palms of her hands.

Jagged bits of brutally knife-edged rubble were imbedded in the skin, which was cruelly abraded from her sudden skid. Even as she watched, the sickly-pale, pink-dotted skin reddened, and then welled over with blood.

Still holding her bleeding hands before her, Tera found that the battle had migrated behind her, and that one of the animals was sprawled on the floor with Derek's pipe slammed a good few inches into the base of its skull right where the brainstem meets the spine, almost completely decapitating it. Bile rose in her throat and she hastily averted her eyes back to her quivering hands. That proved not much better. The hot crimson liquid had begun dripping down the undersides of her shaking, upwards-curled fingers, and pooled at the back of her hand before forming a gory droplet which continued on to detach itself from all restraints and splash anticlimactically against the floor.

Gingerly trying to brush away a few of the cement shards brought a sharp, mind-searing pain behind her eyes, and a ragged hiss of discomfort to her lips. Even as she blindly scrambled out of the way of another creature, the first, with the scar on its nose, noticed this weak, bumbling girl-human, turned its fur-guarded back to Shawn's efforts at battering it with a hunk of concrete, and lumbered towards her.

Chris intercepted before it could achieve much distance in her direction, and laid a vicious slash across its face with his crowbar. Nimbly dancing around its lightning-swift counterattack, he abruptly changed direction. The monster, anticipating this, swung its other heavy paw at him, even as Chris darted in underneath the clumsy blow to stab at the soft skin beneath its shoulder…and collided with Tera as she struggled to get out of the way.

The confused Gladiator tripped over her and tumbled backwards, arms flailing the air. A wince-inducing crunch met the ears of all occupants of the tunnel as Chris's wrist crumpled under the creature's hurtling fist, followed by an agonized howl which most certainly had not come from the beast.

Clutching at his backwards-bent hand, Chris froze in place where he lay on the ground as Derek and Shawn together brought an iron girder down over the monster's furry head. Instead of dropping senselessly as they had expected and hoped, it merely gave throaty snarl and whirled around to face them. This proved only to facilitate Derek whipping the jagged-ended pipe from the head of the other monster, in order to bury it around a foot into the second animal's abdomen. The thing released a choked cough and scrabbled loosely with stiffening claws at the offending object, before keeling over against the wall with a meaty flop.

Noise from above caused the last creature to halt momentarily, and peer out the hole in the ceiling, giving Derek and Shawn time to move to a more advantageous section of the tunnel. Several sharp, grating voices drifted down to the basement where the four were trapped. One of the recognized words was 'fire'. The next second, a bullhorn-amplified shout ordered, "Away from the hole!"

Tera watched from where she had crouched near a slew of rubble, as Chris, smashed hand and wrist dangling unhealthily, edged away from the creatures to gain support from the wall, quivering as he fought a losing battle with the pain. Just before the final remaining beast could decide who it wanted to go after next, a series of screeching whines, closely followed by sharp, subsonic cracks, rang through the tunnel occupants' ears. Peppered with bullets, the monster wavered unsteadily, screamed in the same hideous unearthly fashion, and collapsed. In a grim reversal of prior events, the animals shrunk, and wounds which had already seemed grievous in their massive state now could be likened to pet cats which have been struck by heavy, wide-wheeled cargo trucks.

The bullhorn-voice bellowed, "Everybody alright?" Shawn held a finger to his lips, a warning not to reply. Tera bit her lip.

Chris emitted a strangled whimper. Feeling horribly guilty, Tera glanced sideways at him as he tipped his head back against the cool grit of the cinderblock walls and sighed. Wanting to whisper an apology, yet with tongue-tied idiocy creeping over her, she turned instead towards a muffled mumbling sound seeping through the mountain of ruined concrete and twisted metal. Forgetting her wounded hands, she made to grip a chunk of cement and pull it away. Instead, she gasped and pulled away at the sting, staring stupidly at the blotchy red-brown handprints she had left behind.

Tera did not notice Derek until he had crept up right beside her. "Hey," he said, voice low. "Lemme see." She tentatively held out her hands, palms up, deliberately holding her gaze away from the disfiguring steel. He wrinkled up his nose. "Ouch. Trust me, I'd know." He gestured to the metal plates and implants planted grotesquely all over his torso, and she accidentally looked. "You can get some antitoxin and skin spray later, patch that up 'til it can heal. You only scraped the skin, nothing else is damaged."

Shawn, who had been inspected Chris's wrist, motioned for Derek to take over and moved to the concrete block which Tera had been attempting without much luck to budge. The girl raised an eyebrow as Derek gingerly straightened out the other Gladiator's curled arm amid groans of poorly-suppressed anguish. Shawn nodded towards the sight. "Derek was going to med school before he ended up here. Anyhow, what were you getting at over there?"

Tera pointed at the chunk of cement. Shawn looked at it for a long moment, as if about to bore into it with heat vision, and then switched his stare to her. He repeated this, taking in the small size of the block, until she displayed her hands. With an exaggerated wince, he turned to the rubble and lifted it away, depositing it with a thud on the floor for it to roll unsteadily a few times before rocking to a halt. Noticing a piece of metal jutting above the remaining wreckage, he continued to paw through layers of ashy dust and debris until they both could see what it was.

The heavily-dented and grit-covered console of the elevator stood there; half torn from the floor, it leaned at a crazy angle, though its screen was still active. "That must be what I was hearing," Tera whispered.

Even as she said this, the display flashed twice, and the same monotonous female computer voice announced, "This message will now repeat." Derek stood up and tramped over to see what was happening.

"Attention all personnel. The arena is now under Alert Level Red. Quarantine will be initiated in the next ten seconds. Thank you." The message proceeded to loop again, this time in Spanish, but nobody in the tunnel heard it.

There were a few nanoseconds of silence, as Derek stared at that impossibly thin band of silvery metal looped innocently about his wrist, before he gave a strangled yell and frantically bashed it against the wall. It barked off with a dull clang and a painful thud, and was bounced back to the wall, hammered insanely against impassive cinderblock and crumbly mortar as Derek began to bellow incoherently, a sound born of panic, anger, and utter frustration. With each spastic smack, the wall gained another blotchy red smudge, and then another.

It was with a horrified fascination that Tera looked on, as Shawn took a step towards his comrade; as Derek ceased bashing his hand into the wall. He twitched convulsively, and pressed his bald head against the cinderblocks, shaking. Whipping her gaze to Chris, she saw him still curled against the wall, with no change in his outward exterior, though her scrutiny was interrupted by Derek as his writhing frame was consumed in a bloodless explosion. Simultaneously, the metal plates and other artificial components which dotted his chest and shoulders combusted, swallowing him up before he could open his mouth even to scream. A skeleton, with charred and blackened flakes of ash clinging weakly to the head-scoured bones, had taken his place, and swiftly collapsed with a clunking downpour of woody-sounding clatters.

Chris had curled into an even tighter ball, but as Shawn and Tera watched, nothing happened. Dazedly, not really noticing what was happening to her, Tera found herself being felt over by heavily gloved hands. Suddenly becoming aware of the contact, she was about to swat at them when her eyes strayed to the face of their six-foot-tall owner, and she froze.

The face of the thing reminded her vaguely of Nemo, plated in metal as it was, though it was a much darker shade of indigo, marred by lighter patchings here and there. The head of the robot itself appeared to be molded in the vague shape of a grinning skull, though what with the shoddy repair work it was difficult to tell. Like some little leering eye, a red slit peered out from the right socket, though none glowed from the left. A soldier, perhaps an enhanced PHAD which served for law enforcement.

Whatever government branch owned it obviously did not care too much for its upkeep, as its armored chassis was heavily dented and scarred with silvery slashes. Ominous scorch-marks peeped from beneath the thin coat of paint, standing out as dark spots under the bluish color. As it shifted to unhook something from its utility belt—just like Batman, she thought vaguely—she made out a faded '9' emblazoned on its heavy shoulder pads.

These thoughts dimly filtered through Tera's clouded brain; even as she turned away from the robotic soldier and suppressed the urge to vomit as the stink of seared flesh wafted through the corridor. Her robotic savior made a hand motion, and more dark shapes dropped effortlessly down from the hole in the ceiling. Two of them bent over Chris, as Shawn babbled something about the quivering Gladiator's broken arm.

Broken arm. Smashed wrist. That was what had saved him; the splinters of his bone were no doubt mingling even now with the twisted silver metal of a ruined detonation bracelet. In the midst of her confusion, Tera smiled, and found herself being slowly hoisted out of the basement by a harness. And Shawn, too, holding his dog.

Nothing was making sense right now; Tera felt as she had after she watched Rigel die for the first time. That was mental enough; somebody who could die multiple times, but when she was being rescued by secondhand robots and attacked by undead monsters all in the same day, it became a little too much.

Was she giggling? Oops, how embarrassing. And now she was crying. Funny, the reason for the tears eluded her. Somebody was hugging her and shrieking incoherently in her ear…Alisa, yes, and Anzl hovering on the edge…where was Kiara?…and that robot again…and there was Kax? Why was her brother there?

And then everything went black.

* * *

The first thing which crossed Tera's mind as she began to regain consciousness was that her pillow seemed lumpier and much less comfortable than usual. And that her alarm clock hadn't awoken her with its hideous honking, nor could she recall going to sleep. As she shifted, she became aware of the cold, and that it felt as though her hair was being pulled out behind her, though it took until her sleep-clogged ears recognized the subdued purring of a motor for her eyes to snap open.

Half of her field of vision was blocked by whatever the left side of her face was leaning on, but the road ahead was clearly visible, illuminated by the piercing, cold white beams cast by the convertible's brights. They were driving? Past events tumbled unevenly and in haphazard order from the shelf they had been placed, and Tera jerked fully awake as though she had received a vicious internal jab with a high-powered cattle prod. She had been using Shawn's shoulder as a pillow, she saw now, and was thankful for the darkness as heat pinked her cheeks. Good thing he also appeared to be asleep. A furtive glance to the right found Kax lolling against the side of the car, head almost hanging out of the vehicle as he snored faintly though his half-open mouth.

Maybe the robots had rudely decided to biff everybody upside the head in hopes that they would forget what had happened. In any case, it hadn't worked, so Tera poked her head up through the gap between the front seats to ask whoever the driver was some questions. "What happened?" she shouted against the whistle of oncoming wind, even as the car swerved slightly to dodge a small tree branch across the road. Road, not magnetic highway. She altered her query: "Where are we?"

Anzl tilted his head ever so slightly to acknowledge her presence. "Old Route 40, following them," he said gruffly, and jabbing an almost accusing finger through the night, exposing the tail of a battered navy-blue pickup truck making a turn to the right just ahead of them.

"Who is 'them'?"

Anzl shrugged, but said nothing, and Tera retracted herself back to her seat, to find Kax staring at the still-sleeping Shawn with some measure of distrust. "Kax, how did you get here?" she hissed at her brother.

"Is he the one who pulled that weird call earlier?"

Tera shook her head, both answering and dismissing the question at the same time. "Did you drive out, just because you thought I was in trouble?"

"I didn't drive, Dad did. Mom came along too." He grinned goofily. "The engine worked perfectly. And what did you say?" He pulled a bad imitation of Tera's voice and said squeakily, "'Mechanical prodigy, my face'. That was rude."

She glared at him, realized the possible trouble she had caused, and softened her expression. "Were they really that worried?"

He bobbed his head in acknowledgement. "_Oh _yeah. Dad asked who it was calling on your phone, so I said it was some weirdo British guy, and that the line went dead. Dad sort of spazzed out, and was going to call the police, and Mom tried to get you on the line. But like I said, it didn't work. So then—"

Instantly forgetting the prudence of allowing somebody to finish a sentence before one barges in to change the topic, Tera levered herself upward with her elbows against the backrest as to better view the truck before them. "Callix, think. Did you see who is in that truck?

Kax instantly became serious. Nobody called him by his real name when he wasn't supposed to take the situation seriously. "Ah…" he scratched his head. "Aside from Mom and Dad? No. I saw you and whoever _he_ is get injected with something and fall asleep," he turned a severe glance at Shawn before looking off at the indiscernible landscape. "And then that giant PHAD got me too. It was like that sci-fi we watched the other night with the guy who…"

Tera gave him a severe look, and Kax snapped his mouth shut. A funny snuffling noise arose from under the seat, and Tera's inspection yielded an inquisitive lick. Mick shimmied forward and hopped up onto the space between Shawn and Tera, and, curling his head against his master and his rear against Tera, returned to whatever doggy dreams he had been immersed in previously.

Kax extended his hand and scratched the fur right above the tail. "We left Romana and Spock home alone," he said apologetically, referencing the family cats.

Watching Mick's soft, contented breathing, Tera took a moment to reply. "They'll be fine, so long as you didn't barricade the cat door and so long as Romana doesn't get lost somewhere. You should be worrying about the bird population, though." The little dog, engrossed in whatever his small mind was doing, snorted rather loudly and woke himself up. Wagging his stubby tail appreciatively, he hopped over Tera's lap, trod on her hand, and curled up between brother and sister.

The painful pressure on her hand drew a gasp through her gritted teeth; reminded her of the awful scabs she would have for a while. Somebody had wrapped gauze around both hands, making movement difficult, but the general numbness suggested antitoxin and analgesic spray had been applied underneath. Shawn hadn't woken up yet, so she couldn't barrage him with questions, nor did she think that appropriate, what with the events that had just taken place. Remembering how she had lost her sandal in the unruly elevator, Tera pulled her bare foot up onto her lap, careful not to whack Mick's outstretch muzzle with her knee. Aside from a few minor abrasions between ball and heel, her constant insistence on refusing shoes when she was smaller had paid off, and the unobtrusive calluses themselves had not been punctured.

Kax finally broke the silence, brushing recently-spiked tufts of hair back from his forehead. "So…" he said slowly, drawing out the word until it became nothing but the act of exhalation. "How did the match go?"

The match? Oh yes. Gilgamesh, Shawn's illegal grenade—"It was interesting," she said vaguely, casting another glance at Shawn. He had shifted a little, and mumbled something, but remained cocooned in slumber.

"Interesting." Kax repeated. "Who fought?"

Tera felt a muscle in her jaw twitch, flutter hesitantly, and then cease its meaningless spasm and lay still. "Gilgamesh and Rigel."

"Gilgamesh? Really?"

"Yes. He caught on fire." It probably wasn't fair to hate Kax for his expression of boyish enthusiasm. Tera wished she had just said that the champion Gladiator had lost.

Anzl put in his own comment from the front seat, inclining his head towards them slightly to overcome the muffling effects of the road-wind. "Bastard used a plasma grenade on him," he snarled over the draft, wrenching the wheel to the left with unnecessary violence. "Gil didn't have a chance." Tera was about to issue a biting retort touching on the relative skill and height difference between Rigel and 'Gil', but Alisa, who had remained silent up to now, agreed with Anzl, and the two began a heated yet amiable discourse, which effectively eliminated the back-seat passengers from existence.

Tera leaned back, and realized that Kax had said something. "Huh?"

"Did he die, I said. And what happened?" The boy aimed a meaningful nudge of the eyes in the direction of Shawn, who hummed breathlessly for a few seconds in the gruff, tuneless way that sleeping people are wont to do. Perhaps he was dreaming, Tera wondered. The young man shifted, and Mick transferred himself worriedly back to his master's side.

"Maybe, I don't know, I don't care." Tera looked over at the Gladiator next to her. "And as for what happened?" Tera pondered this. _Oh, well, I saw a guy who was dead and wasn't, and went downstairs into the Gladiator area and was attacked by a demonic lunchbox and undead Arena monsters gone wrong(er). _She told him anyway.

For a long while after, nobody spoke, and realization was allowed to creep in under the arcing rainbow of the moon's path across the sky. Tera became aware of the distorted noise of wind as the car ruthlessly bludgeoned its way through what had been the chilly, yet motionless, muggy air, and how it squealed discordantly around the side-view mirrors each time the vehicle nosed to the right or left. With the dusty taste of the night drying her mouth and damping her eyes, she had time to discover the sour flavor of guilt and sadness in her stomach. Kax, having given up staring at his sister and her apparent insanity, was staring out over the scruffy landscape instead.

Old Route 40. Nobody drove there anymore, and the government had abandoned it to history. Some complication during initial maglev installation had resulted in Route 40 being ignored, while a newer road bypassed the desert there and shot off by a more pleasant route. Perhaps, if the giant robots insisted on taking this lost road, they were trying to hide something. What would they wish to hide?

Tera craned her neck around and discovered only the road behind them, aged reflective bumps occasionally catching the glare of the car's rear lights and illuminating the faded white dividing streaks as the markings fell away to the rear. She wished to sleep, but every time she stopped concentrating on the rapidly receding silvery-white line, her unruly mind laughingly replayed a quivering man curled against the wall, and a skeleton collapsing into a puddle of pallid, ashy grit.

She felt fairly sure that the harsh wind in her eyes was not the reason for her tears.

* * *

Word Count: **6429**

Sorry again for just how stupidly long it took me to update. I have chapter 6 half-written by now, but knowing me...anyway, hope you liked it. Let me know what you think. Much love to everyone who's reviewed so far. You guys're awesome.


	6. The Great Cell Phone Conspiracy

Well, here we are again. This update at least hasn't taken half a year to show up, so...and it still doesn't get where I wanted it to. I'm not making any more predictions as to where the next chapter will take the plot.

Again, thanks to EVERYONE who's reviewed, it's a great motivator to keep me going. So long as I have readers, I'll continue. Without further prattle...

* * *

_A Second Chance for Redemption_

A semi-original fiction

by Fusionmix

_Chapter 6_

†††

…'_Cause you don't _

_Want to be around_

_When it all goes down,_

_Even heroes know when to be scared._

_-"Slip Out The Back", Fort Minor-_

Tera eventually awoke; jarred into reality when the doors of the car hissed upwards, exposing her to the purple-lit chill. Kax shook her gently. "Come on," he whispered. "We're here." A slow glance confirmed where 'here' was, as the dingy, run-down motel met her gaze. Still too sleepy to put anything together, she was left to shiver in the still early-morning air and miserably wonder why she was not at her own home, in her own bed. A cold shock like ice water drove the breath from her as she recalled preceding events. Hunched over and hugging herself, Tera was aware of a funny pain and swelling lump beneath the fatigue-stretched, glaringly white skin of her shoulder, like the aftermath of a tetanus shot.

As she looked aimlessly around in the manner of a lost kitten, she slowly rubbed her palms together to warm them; stopped as pain shot through them. The analgesic spray was apparently wearing off. To get her mind off of the persistent burn of her hands and the cold pavement under her bare foot, Tera glanced across the nearly-abandoned parking lot, and her eyes fixed on the blue pickup truck that they had been following.

From the truck, four figures emerged; the first was obviously one of the giant PHADs, but the second was the more familiar blue shape of Nemo. More unpleasantly came Laura and Eric Ankiel. The latter of which quickly spotted Tera, and seemed on the verge of stomping forward before Laura placed a restraining hand on his arm. Something quailing within her, Tera turned away quickly as though she was ignorant of their presence, and focused on the dirty limestone facade of the motel.

The motel was one of the cheap self check-in kinds, which demanded that one insert a credit card before the door to a room would even open. The party arranged itself into two groups before going into the building; and Tera caught a glimpse of two more tall PHADs unfolding themselves from the back of the pickup in order to lug a man-sized freezer box into the motel. Tera found herself tasked with helping Anzl and Alisa half-drag, half-carry the still-sleeping Shawn through the cricket-chirp infused air and into the motel. Greeted by fuzzy music, the entire group waited until a nearby elevator blinked on in response to Eric's stiff punches at the button.

Tera could see her mother speaking to him, but from the rigid way that Eric shrugged Laura off, she could tell that she was in for quite the lecture later. Shawn's feet were growing heavy; and her hands were burning with more insistency as she retightened her grip in order to keep his back from grazing the filthy grout of the tile floor. Kax came to the rescue as the elevator opened; he silently took her place, wrestling Shawn into the elevator car. Tera stood awkwardly as the two PHADs entered a second elevator with their burden, joined by the other, who ignored Tera and Nemo outside the door.

"You are in unstable emotional condition," the little blue robot stated tonelessly. "This is identical to the situation following your previous experience with the-"

He was cut off as Tera snapped at him, "I don't need to hear 'I told you so' from a robot, all right? I know what I feel like right now, I know why, and I don't need to hear it from you." Breathing erratically, she instantly regretted her anger at him. Meanwhile, everybody finished scuffling about in the elevator. "Any room for me?" she asked dubiously.

"No…sweetie," Laura replied absently, trying to listen to Eric's infuriated whispers while she spoke to her daughter at the same time. "Sorry, no room. Just get in when the elevator comes back."

Nemo stared at the slowly-closing doors. A few seconds went by without any sounds but the muzak sizzling half-heartedly in the speakers, and the squealing of the elevator as it left its dock and headed upwards. "Who are that man and boy?" he asked at length.

Lost in her own thoughts, Tera gave him a very unintelligent, "Huh?"

"The boy you and your companions were assisting, and the man in the box."

That was Shawn obviously, and in the box…that would have to be Chris, as Tera could think of no one else that would be in a cryogenic freeze box. Perhaps his broken arm had somehow sprung some infection? It wouldn't be too unlikely, considering the caked filth on the claws of the creature who had ruined the limb. Or he could be dead, though why they would bother trucking along a dead Gladiator was not something she could comprehend. Tera answered the robot in a matter-of-fact fashion, knowing and glad that the robot would not pursue the matter.

The lift, when it came, was not all too different from the cramped elevator in the Arena basement. Before she allowed the doors to squeal shut, Tera diligently inspected its controls, assuring herself that it was not one-way. As it lurched, her heart momentarily took a dive, and her mind replayed a few unpleasant scenes of the incident in the elevator. Of course it would not, could not be a one-way elevator. An oily clunk signaled the halt of the lift, and she gingerly emerged into the hallway. It was dimly lit; painfully similar to the corridor in the basement of the Arena, though the homely faded glory of the red and gold wallpapering and carpet helped push the mental image away. Gaudy gold-tinted light fixtures jutted from the walls like medieval torch brackets, though placed so low that if Tera were to walk near the wall it wouldn't be too unlikely for her to knock her head on them.

She nearly missed the door to the room, but Nemo quietly assured her that the muted voices behind 96 and 97 were those of the others. Somebody had jammed the door open a crack with their sandal, and Tera met with the realization that Kiara was missing. This momentary epiphany temporarily brought a new level to her worry, and she slipped into the room, the doorknob jabbing her as she went by. Inside, Anzl and Kax were settling the cryobox that probably contained Chris in the corner. Her bare foot found a staple hidden in the bedraggled carpet, and she awkwardly hopped the rest of the way to where the box had been placed. "Where's Kiara?"

Anzl wiped his face on the sleeve of his t-shirt; ran a hand through his white-tipped red hair. "We left her," he said simply, quietly. "The robots took her car, and pushed us in at gunpoint and told us to follow them. We weren't going to, but then they said that we would be killed because we had been under the Arena."

"Seriously."

"I'm being serious. Kiara told them that only you had gone down, but they wouldn't listen. Then she told them the whole thing about the car being her dad's; they injected her with something and she fell over. Marty was in the restroom the entire time that you were down wherever and knew nothing about it, so they told him to get her home."

Tera shook her head slowly. "Why did they bring you? What do you mean by killed?"

Anzl's eyes flashed. "I don't know. Does it look like we wanted to come? Do you think we wanted to leave and come along with a group of crazed PHADs?" He waited for a minute, and then tried a smile, but it wasn't the slow and lazy one that Alisa would giggle over. This one spread in a thin, white-lipped line, its edges twitching upwards pitifully. "Sorry. I know it isn't your fault."

"Does...somebody think it is?" Ice crawled along Tera's jawline, and something cold and leaden dropped from her chest into her stomach like a fishing weight plunking into the ocean. People weren't blaming her for this, were they? She stared at Anzl, a little too hard for her own comfort, and broke eye contact. Kax wisely left to the adjoining room; Tera breathed a mental sigh of relief.

Anzl nodded, the motion barely noticeable as it took the form of a quick tensing of the cords in his neck. "Alisa does," he whispered softly, and then blinked. "Why did you go down? Just explain why the _hell_ you went down and then maybe someone will feel sympathetic."

"I..." This was a bit difficult to explain. 'A bit difficult' was the understatement of the century. "I can't." she said weakly, focusing on the grit caked under her toenails, unable to meet his accusing gaze.

He leaned his head back; cracked his shoulders and peered out the foggy window into the grey morning. "I was hoping you could tell me that Kax was kidding." The green eyes turned back to her, his three matching fake-emerald eyebrow studs caught the slowly awakening sunlight, and Tera squinted for a split second as the glare temporarily blinded her. "Apparently," Anzl drawled. "I was mistaken."

When it became clear that he was not going to continue, Tera tiptoed unobtrusively away. Her father brushed roughly past her as she headed grim-faced into the adjoining room, and he grunted a minor apology. He swept out into the hallway, and as the door clicked shut behind him, Tera caught a potent whiff of rose-scented hallway air freshener. Ignoring its stale fragrance, she whirled on her brother who was absently flipping channels on the television set. "What did you tell Anzl?" She snarled, surprised by the venom in her voice.

"Exactly what you told me."

"You sure? Nothing else?" Strange how she almost felt disappointed.

"Yup." He popped the 'p' obnoxiously.

A sigh passed from her lips, and she gingerly rubbed her gritty face with dirty, bandaged hands. "Where's Dad going?"

"Store. We need food."

"So we aren't going home any time soon, then?" Tera waited for his response, but her brother had already turned his bored attention back to the TV. Giving up on any form of meaningful conversation, she instead queried, "Anything good on?"

Kax tossed the remote from one hand to the other. "Let's see...endless soap operas, badly translated anime, and...more soap operas. In short, no."

Tera glanced at the screen; sat next to Kax on the foot of a bed. Meanwhile, on the TV, a grungy man was engaging in a screaming fit with a scantily clad blonde girl, which was broken up when Scantily Clad Blonde's handsome yet boring husband barged in and began throwing furniture at Grungy Boyfriend. After a few moments of this, Kax gave up and switched it off, pulling his iPod out of his pocket. Not that it even was an "iPod" in terms of the devices made by Apple, but the device had become so immensely popular that the word had come to be synonymous with the generic 'multimedia player'.

The door to the other room squealed open and then slammed shut, heralding the premature return of Eric. Rustling up to Tera in the navy-blue overcoat he hadn't bothered to take off, he roughly gripped both of her wrists, and twisted her palms savagely upward to survey their patched injuries. "Who did this?" he rumbled.

She bit her lip; found herself peering over at where Kax lay sprawled on the bed staring at the video screen of his iPod. No help forthcoming. "I...fell," she mumbled to her dad, focusing on the brown of his t-shirt. "And hurt my hands. Nobody did it, I just slipped and fell."

His gaze held the accusatory note that Anzl's had, but also something more, something in the sudden tic of his jaw and the deepening of the slight lines in his forehead. "Wash your hands," he barked. "And then see me on the balcony."

Eric turned, preparing to leave for the other room when Kax decided to take note of the situation and sat up, pulling the earbuds from him. "Dad, I thought you were going to the—"

Eric ground his teeth in frustration, suppressing an expletive as he interrupted his son. "Those rogue PHADs are standing out around the cars, guarding them so we can't leave before they're ready to let us. They took my cell phone, too, so I can't make a call." Calming a little, he added gruffly, "Tell your mother not to use her phone around them. They were somehow able to tell that I was using it from yards away." Eric completed his turn, and the room was left silent in his wake.

His daughter let out a breath she hadn't been aware she was holding, and Kax grinned nervously. "Ooh boy. Hate to be you." The silly expression faded as his sister stomped first to the bathroom and then to the balcony and slammed the door. It wasn't this sudden exodus that worried him. It was the fact that she hadn't bothered even to shoot him a glare or a few profane words before she left.

* * *

The balcony had been warm, but inside, Tera felt like she had just visited Antarctica. Though Eric's aggravation at their situation had faded some, his outright disbelief at her foolishness in the Arena had easily substituted for it. The lecture he gave her wasn't as long as some of the ones she'd experienced in the past, but the hurt and fury clenched up in his voice when he relayed how frightened the rest of the family had been seemed to make the one-sided conversation longer. However, it was the end of the talk that had brought up the ice in her.

Tera still could not explain why she had followed Shawn down the elevator. It was the child in her that believed he was the same as the Gladiator who she had watched die a year ago, and the logic in her that stated that was flat-out impossible. This conflict was part of the reason why the story wouldn't come out, but Eric had gone into a violent state, shaking her by the shoulders and yelling into her face that what she had done was idiotic. He wouldn't believe that the Gladiators hadn't wanted to hurt her; that they would have helped her get out.

Instead, Eric Ankiel screamed at his daughter that she could have been killed or tortured, and then went on in the heat of the moment to say that it was her fault that they were in this predicament. Tera had wanted to scream back, to injure him and somehow prove that she wasn't stupid, and that it wasn't her fault.

In place of this, she stood silently, imagining lasers flaming from her eyes and turning him into a pile of sooty ash. Her mind saw Derek then, and tears came instead of fire, leading her to shove her still-yelling father out of the way and retreat in a misty-eyed cloud to the shelter of the hotel hallway. As she left in this state, her mother rose in alarm and footsteps padded hastily across the worn carpet after her, but Tera had gone, escaping to the deserted lobby to calm down in peace.

Finding a few bills in her pocket, she decided to raid the snack machine, given that the last thing she had eaten was the hamburger which had been rather nastily smothered in mayonnaise. With her burden of various unhealthy sugary and salty items of dubious edible quality, Tera got up the courage to return to the room. Amid sidelong glances, Laura picked through her contribution, both offering thanks and lamenting the amounts of fat and sodium in the same breath.

Shawn still remained unconscious. "Um…" Tera began hesitantly, and Alisa looked over from where she had been carrying on a hushed conversation with Anzl. "Has he woken up…at all?"

"What do you think?" Alisa said flatly, before turning back to her boyfriend again. Tera was sure they had been going out—they'd tried to keep it under wraps, but failed—and might even be considering getting a union license sometime soon. Feeling rather cowed, she made to move off when Laura briskly walked over.

"Well," she said brightly, holding up packages of snack food. "We have barbecue chips and plain."

Tera slumped on the armchair next to Chris' cryobox and mentally groaned, massaging her pounding temples. It was far, far too early for any of this. The clock read 6:30, and part of her sleepy brain registered that this was an hour before she usually would wake up, before the angst-consumed other part began ranting about the unfairness of it all before breaking down completely and spouting half-finished thoughts in a stream of panicked gibberish. Had Tera been about nine years younger, she probably would have begun weeping, except that now she was seventeen and considered herself too old for that.

The chair squeaked as she stood, the sound reminding her of the faded purple sofa at home. Tacos! She had eaten tacos yesterday, on the plate with the elephants on it…. Blinking, she shook her head a few times to temporarily clear the sleep from it. Leaning on the side of the seat, Tera regarded Shawn's prone, sprawling form. Eyes drawn to the sharply-inked tattoo on his shoulder, the same funny chill from yesterday ran through her. The marking spitefully glared at her—the spike-rimmed, basilisk red eye that had been marked on his armor. Curious, she stepped gingerly over him to survey his other arm. There was the rose, darker and deeper hued in the shadow of the furniture, though it had a strangely tropical appearance, as though crossed with a crimson hibiscus.

It was good work; even Tera's lack of any experience with tattoos couldn't keep her from being aware of this fact. Her mind wandered back to his strange behavior back in the basement of the Arena, what with the whole, "last time I died" thing. Maybe he was insane? He couldn't possibly be the same Gladiator from before. She wanted it to be, though, and now could recognize that she did. Noticing that Alisa had left the room and Anzl was still deadpanned before the window, Tera bent low by Shawn's face; brushed some of the hair back and out of it. No scars, nothing.

If it was the same man, he had an absolutely fantastic plastic surgeon.

Her reverie was forcibly shattered as Laura wandered agitatedly through the room, peering at her cell phone. "Mom, do you need anything?" she asked, straightening up quickly.

"No, but thanks for asking. There's no signal to call, but somehow I was able to get the message backup from the service provider. If there's no signal, that couldn't have happened. And there's even a cell tower outside."

Recalling one of the more interesting and less unpleasant aspects of her conversation with Eric, Tera pointed out, "Dad says not to make any phone calls, the robots took his phone when they saw him making one."

"Maybe," Kax had a thoughtful expression on his face as he ambled in with a package of pretzels, "They were able to use Dad's phone to see how call signals were sent, and then cause enough interference to prevent any calls from us via cell phone. But the message backup data could still be taken, because it was incoming signal, not outgoing. I'll bet if someone else asks for a message transfer, they can't get one now."

Tera couldn't help a smile. "And it's all part of an alien conspiracy, am I right?"

"Naw. Unless these giant robots are just some sort of scout, and they needed to see how we communicate in order to shut the system down. Then, when the world goes into global chaos…"

"The world goes into global chaos because our cell phones don't work?"

Kax rolled his eyes at his sister's interruption. "Well, they probably have something else planned. So, anyway, when the world goes into global chaos, then they call in the army. Or, they could be agents for some secret organization, who didn't want us to know about something and are taking us away to be executed."

_Now that_, Tera had to confess, _is actually something of an idea_. Hadn't Chris said that nobody actually knew how Gladiators were treated? She certainly hadn't, and everyone who followed the Games worshipped the Gladiators like superstars. "Except, Kax," she began as the idea was squashed by a thought, "If they wanted to execute us, they could just rip us into pieces and say the escaped Arena monsters did it. I'm sure a lot of people died back there."

"There's that." he admitted, crestfallen.

Tera crossed her arms. "And the whole incoming-outgoing data idea really doesn't make much sense either."

During this exchange, the air had been filled with the muted taps of the buttons on their mother's cell phone. Abruptly, she stopped; lifted her eyes from the screen. "I've got _all_ my messages backed up. I only asked for the last two weeks because of a conversation…this goes back before you were born, Tera."

Kax thrust both hands into his hair and scratched his head furiously, doing a passable—if unintentional—impression of a hedgehog experiencing an epileptic seizure. "What if…" he began, calming a bit and quickly raking his fingers back, combing his hair into some semblance of order. "…what if those PHADs can somehow stop everything on our phones? Nemo can call us whenever he feels like it just by using the same signal as a telephone. What if those robots can find that signal and stop it? Like interference, but only for that signal? 'Cause I bet that they had stopped it as soon as they got Dad's phone. But they can't send or receive actual files so maybe somehow they couldn't block the message backup so it was able to come through even though we can't call or be called." He grinned lazily and flopped on the sofa.

Tera blinked. "It's possible. Maybe."

"Or," came Anzl's drawl from across the room, "The message backup started and finished before they ever did anything. You have PermaNet, right?"

Laura nodded. "A friend hooked me up with it back in university; I really don't know how it works, except that it comes in handy quite a bit-"

"For saving all of the phone numbers and names and old out-of-date addresses and messages from all the people you know in college. Top notch stuff," said Kax.

Anzl ignored him. "So whatever the 'bots did glitched it and it gave you every single one of your messages instead of just the few you asked for. Can I take a look?" Laura wordlessly passed it to him. "I'm usually pretty good with this kind of stuff. Yeah, see, here, half the messages aren't available. Kax was right, they're corrupted, or only halfway here. Once the interference lets up, the file transfer should finish. Mind if I…?" He held the cursor over one message, looking to her for approval. Getting it, he tapped the speaker button and a cheery voice with a German accent piped out, talking about something related to food.

"Oh," exclaimed Laura breathlessly, standing on tiptoe to see the screen, as though it would help her hear. "Oh, wow. I haven't seen her since school!" She took the phone back. "Is that Petra? Yes, she loved to cook, I remember that. I wonder if her phone number still works?" Still gushing about the wonders of message backup, she didn't notice as Anzl left the room in the silent way he was apt to do. As the message ended, she too left Kax and Tera to their own devices.

"Told you," said Kax vaguely to nobody in particular as he rooted about in his pretzel bag. "Top notch stuff. Anyway, sister of mine, how's your comatose boyfriend?"

"Gladiator."

Kax dropped the last pretzel to the stringy carpet and promptly crushed it underfoot as he hauled himself upright. "What? Seriously? What's his callsign? What's his rank?"

_Screw you, Tera_, she thought cruelly to herself. _Shouldn't have told him anything. _"Uh…I don't know…I met him in the basement." She winced at just how wrong that sounded, but her brother didn't seem to notice.

"You don't know _anything_ about him?" The incredulously wide-eyed expression he gave her brought up the impulse to commit bodily harm.

"No." Tera mentally glared at the awestruck 15-year-old.

"Damn," he whispered. "He's one of the Gladiators? You're sure you're serious?"

Shawn interrupted any further questions by gasping wheezily and lunging wildly to a sitting position; his flailing arms nearly strike Tera across the knees. Kax had the presence of mind to grab one of them as the Gladiator fell back again, preventing his head from smacking into the cryogenic freezer box. "Whoa. You alright?"

Blinking dazedly, Shawn pulled his arm from the boy's grasp and swept his hair from his face. "Yeah," he said breathlessly. Noticing Tera standing stupidly a few feet away, he managed to focus his eyes and pulled his knees up to his chest. "How long was I out?"

Tera opened and shut her mouth once before she managed a reply. "Er…a long time?" Realizing the absolute unhelpfulness of this excuse for a response, she shook her head quickly and clarified; "The PHADs put us all to sleep. You were the only one who hadn't woken up yet."

"Drugs, yeah, that would do it."

"Allergy?"

"You could call it that." He gave her a strange, crooked smile.

Noticing Kax's poorly-suppressed excitement, Tera cleared her throat. "Oh, uh, Shawn, this is my brother Callix, or just Kax; Kax, this is Shawn. Yep."

Shawn nodded towards him, almost a wordless 'good to meet you', before returning his attention to her. She thought Kax's crestfallen expression vaguely flattering.

"Anyway. Rundown?"

"You should probably ask Anzl, he did the driving."

"Anzl?"

"Oh, sorry, right, er…he's the one with the multi-colored hair. That way"

Shawn nodded again, turned away, and then stopped. "Your hands alright?"

"Yeah."

"That's good." With that, he headed for the other room. Before he even completed a step, the doors banged open and a pair of the robots ducked in, bent ever so slightly in order to keep their antennae-like audio sensors from scraping against the ceiling. "Time to leave," rasped the first, whose in-need-of-repair voice modulator lent it the tone of some irate science fiction monster. "Single file."

Alisa, with Anzl's hand in a white-knuckled grip, meekly followed it. Slowly, Shawn did as well, then stopped. "Where's my dog?" he asked.

The single red light flickered in the robot's one useful eye, as it focused itself on his face. "Dog?" Tera had a flash of worry as she realized that Mick had not been in the car with her when she woke up. Callix, as though experiencing this exact same thought, looked to her and shrugged.

"Small, white. A little less that two feet high?"

"Move."

Shawn swallowed hard, but he moved. Nemo stood by Chris' cryobox. "What of the man? He is incapacitated." The second PHAD, the one who had called down to the Arena basement via the bullhorn, clumped across the room and effortlessly swung the cryobox aloft.

"Move."

And everyone did. Everyone, that is, except Eric, who stood with legs slightly apart and eyes as hard as chips of brown marble. Laura had apparently given up on trying to stir him. Wordlessly, the second robot tossed him his cell phone which had been apprehended earlier. "I am sorry I took it by force. We needed to stop your communications, so that you do not alert law enforcement." Pausing, the PHAD addressed everyone in the room. "We are not going to harm you. We are not going to kill you. We are here to save you."

"From what?" spat Eric.

"You will be told when we arrive." A slight clunk sounded as the robot adjusted what looked to be a large pistol in its belt. "Move."

Though reluctant, Eric moved, and his wife followed him. He pulled her close, protectively, and turned a commanding gaze to Tera. Teeth clamped together, she stiffly walked to his side, ignoring the hand he offered to her.

Bit by bit, the group straggled out into the hallway, milling about in the lobby before exiting into the humid morning air.

By the time the sun scoured the last cool breeze from the air, they were gone.

* * *

"_Failure?" The word nearly squealed out, catching roughly in his throat and blasting hard into her face. "Where is he? WHERE IS HE?"_

_Hot fear gripped her belly and clawed around her shoulders. "I do not know, my Lord. I will find him, I promise I will not fail you this time!"_

"_No, you will not! You will find him. And once you do, we will send more soldiers. Many more. Enough to drag him back to me."_

_Noticing that his wrath had redirected itself, she braved a question: "The Mimigas are strong, my Lord?"_

"_Yes, strong, but not yet unstoppable. They must truly be golems, locked to my power, so that neither pain nor injury can halt them; so that they continue fighting until they have no muscles left to direct their actions, and no blood left to spill. And then…then…then…."_

_He dragged out the word into a high-pitched whisper before grumbling, "They are yet too susceptible to primitive projectile weaponry."_

"_Soldiers killed them."_

"_As I said-"_

"_Not Human soldiers. Soldiers from the Surface. The ones taken from here."_

_The crazed madness in his eyes fades to terror, and then to fury. "Who has said this?"  
_

"_Balrog, my Lord. He was watching." She watches as he fights to stand, fights to force his shambling limbs to bear his weight, and slumps back. Frightened, she attempts to make amends. "The first Soldiers. Not the small robot-"_

"_You will search, Misery! You will search until you find! And then, when I am strong again...then…then…."_

_Again, the word becomes nearly a giggle._

_Bowing hastily, she flees. _

* * *

Word Count: **5024**

Finally. And from here, it just gets exciting. More exciting.

Also, know that previous chapters are also going to be undergoing another round of minor fixes and such. If you notice inconsistencies, please point them out so I can correct them.

For some reason, the Evil Guy of Italicized Doom is starting to read a little like Davros…I think it's the demented scientist thing happening. I'm replaying the game (again), so I'll come in and try and make it more Doctorish. Though, time has twisted his brain a little more since the end of Cave Story, so...meh. Feedbacks. I'd offer cake, but everyone knows the cake is a lie, so I'll offer pocket-sized Polar Spurs instead - definitely NSFW.


	7. Of Motel Arson

You know, I'm not even going to comment on how long this thing took to get here. I lose my Internet nine months out of the year most of the time, and have no time to write.

This is essentially just the first half of a really big chapter, but I needed to update.

Enjoy, and anyone who wants to berate me for my awful update schedule is allowed to throw anything they wish.

* * *

_A Second Chance for Redemption_

A semi-original fiction

by Fusionmix

_Chapter 7_

†††

"It's a good thing it's summer, or there'd be ice all over this road," Tera observed, craning her neck in order to peer out of the battered pickup's window at the aging asphalt. Beside her, Kax gave no notice of her remark, and next to him, her mother only muttered a dry acknowledgement. Well. That attempt at diffusing the tension had rather failed.

Eric, rigid in the front seat, alternately beamed fiery glares at the robot driver and then at the nearly-invisible black sports car ahead of them. The harsh red beams of its rear lights tinted his face a bloody color, and Tera absentmindedly imagined him as the rampaging chainsaw-wielding antagonist of some horror movie. Except that he was too handsome to fit that role. The part of 'internally-struggling antihero' would most likely fit him better.

Old Route 40, still intact but cracked heavily by its Wheeled Cargo Vehicle Only traffic, rushed by beneath the two cars. This second day of driving had seen the company leave Texas and New Mexico behind. An ancient rust-mottled sign, heeled over at a crazy angle, caught the truck's headlights and flashed the faded letters, "WELCOME TO ARIZONA". Two states away from home, being escorted by brain-damaged giant PHADs to who knows where, and all Tera could think about was the fact that her hair was greasy and she had no change of clothes. What a girly thing to do.

* * *

She had been unaware of her drift into slumber, but snapped awake as something licked the back of her calf. Mildly delighted, she bent and her hand made contact with a warm, fuzzy thing, which proceeded to butt its blunt muzzle against her wrist. "Mick!" she cried softly, and pulled the dog from beneath the seats.

"He was in here the whole time?" Kax offered a finger to the animal, which hopped into his lap and, planting its furry paws on his shoulders, commenced licking his chin as though to wash off the negligible bits of teen stubble.

Laura smiled properly for the first time. "Oh, wow, whose dog is it?" Finding someone else to adore him, Mick daintily crossed over to her and curled up with his head on her knee. "He's a sweetheart."

Tera reached over her brother to scratch the dog's outstretched head. "This is Mick, he belongs to Shawn." Seeing the question in Laura's eyes, she added, "The guy with the black hair."

"And the tattoos," Added her mother, tone soft but bent with disapproval. "You know him?"

"He's a-" Kax found the words squeaked away by a vicious kick in the ankle from his sister. "He thought Mick was lost at the last motel," he amended, and leaned over to rub at where a bruise was forming. "He was at the Arena."

Tera rested her head against the blurry window, flecked with bits of paint left over from the less-than-thorough coloring job the old pickup had endured. Dropping in pitch by a few octaves, the road noise vibrated inside her skull until she sat up again and looked over at her brother. Catching her eye, he gestured out the back window to where one of the robots cast a shadow into the cramped 'king-sized' cab of the vehicle. "Any theories?" he asked.

She glanced quickly at the PHAD behind the wheel, but it remained staring resolutely ahead in its mechanical efforts to follow the lead car. "Well, this could be their idea of a rescue, though the Arena breakout was already contained. Or they might be insane."

"The robotic equivalent of insanity usually involves a lot of twitching and eventual overstrain on the joints. Crazed robots tend to destroy themselves," Kax pointed out flatly, as though reading from a textbook. "I'd bet this group actually belongs to some terrorist organization planning to take us hostage. Except that there's nobody to pay the ransom. Huh." Having squashed his own proposal, he remained silent for the rest of the trip, leaving the dusty smell of the truck and the mind-numbing rattling of its motion as the only sources of sensory input.

* * *

"Oh my god, this isn't for real. This is _not _for real. _This isn't happening_!"

At two in the morning, Alisa's worried notes were comparable to an alarm clock, except minus the snooze button, off switch, and plug. Tera clamped the scratchy couch pillow over her head as Alisa swept by, and inadvertently inhaled a toxic blend of stale cigarette smoke and sickly-sweet grossness from the cushion's musty depths as she did. Holding her breath, she willed herself to awareness as her half-functioning sleep-deprived brain proceeded to spew unintelligible gibberish.

Alisa continued to rant. "The others already _left_? Why the hell are they…"

Suddenly awake, Tera whipped her head up. "What?" she cried. At least, to her it sounded like 'what', but the puzzled look on Anzl's face revealed it had been more of a muffled "Hnng?" noise.

"Everybody else left," shrilled Alisa. "It's just us and one of those PHADs. Oh my god, what if they're going to leave us?"

Anzl helpfully handed Tera her single flip-flop as she swung herself off of the couch she had spent the meager last few hours attempting to sleep on. Her hands twinged as she did; she suppressed a pained flinch. "Are we going?"

"Yeah," Anzl replied, eyes following Alisa as she teetered around the motel room with her face in her hands. "Yeah, we're supposed to get ready. The last robot said to get our stuff together."

Not like there was anything to gather up. Tera nodded, adrenaline banishing sleep from her veins. "Alright, thanks. Are we…do we know where the others went?"

"They left an hour earlier in the truck. I don't know why we split up, but it's likely we'll follow them." He turned away and went to stand by Alisa, who had pressed her face against the window. Pushing to her feet, Tera trotted into the bathroom in hopes of maybe washing some of the muddy-red stains from the scabbed areas of her hands. It smelled like a bus station restroom despite the labored groaning of an air freshener, and she would have left immediately with a gag had not the silver rectangle of her mother's phone on the counter caught her attention. "Good thing I came in here," she commented softly to herself, and pocketed the device. On second thought, she leaned against the wall outside the bathroom and gingerly took the phone in her less-scraped hand. "I wonder if the message backup finished?"

It had, except that the messages from the last three or four years had been declined thanks to notices dating back to Laura Ankiel's college days filling up all of the phone's available memory. Partially out of curiosity, and partly because of boredom, Tera deftly thumbed the screen down to the earliest message and selected its blue-lit date. More than nineteen years ago…she hadn't even been born yet.

Tinny and crunched with unintended reverb, a young man's voice crackled out, wavering wildly between silent and extremely loud. "Alright, testing…ah, hell, is it on? It is on. Right then, is…Laura, sorry, I can't seem to make…two three…there we are, doesn't help that I just got a new earpiece, and keep pressing the volume with my cheek. Anyway, if you get this, then I've got you hooked up. With PermaNet. Yeah. See you later?" And then it stopped. The voice had an undoubtedly English accent; marking the person as an acquaintance from the overseas university Tera's mother had attended.

Laura's daughter found herself sharply reminded both of Chris and her family simultaneously, and punched in the gut with anxiety. Her mom, dad, and brother were somewhere unknown. A man was immobile in an infection-stopping cryogenic freezer box, with a smashed hand, all because he had tripped over her when she got in the way. Another man had experienced having every atom of his being incinerated into flakes of delicate grey ash. Well, his death probably was the fault only of the Arena Controllers and their cover-up 'quarantine' maneuver, but Tera still had to blink for a few moments to force clarity into her vision when she thought of it.

Now was not the time to break down. She could do that later. _I probably ought to write down the conditions I saw down there_, she thought to herself as her mind proposed a flash of inspiration. _Then I could publish them on the net. It would piss off the Arena fanboys, but would certainly get the owners in a lot of trouble, even in the government turns a blind eye. The Gladiators are treated like slaves, not superstars_…

Scooping up the reflections on her family and depositing them in a mental laundry chute to be dealt with in a while, Tera began filtering through her various memories of the Arena basement, from the infamous one-way elevator to the slum-quality 'housing' and the bracelets that had led to Derek's demise. _Plenty of exposé-fodder here. _

But before she could begin planning out her journalistic debut, the window of their first-floor room exploded. No other words existed that would fit exactly the event that occurred, other than to say the pane bulged, flared white, and then vomited a spatter of liquid fire into the room. Tera lunged to beat on a tiny carpet flame whilst simultaneously staring incredulously as the one-eyed robot vaulted through the gap, casting its flat red-glowing judgment on each occupant of the room in turn. "Do not fight the fires," it grated, swinging a too-bulky left arm towards the way it had entered. "Exit by the window. The drop is not far." It clunked over to block the room's single entrance when Alisa tried to tiptoe towards it.

Anzl dropped through the window first; Tera having volunteered to go last in order to observe the battle machine which stood stock-still before the door while Alisa tumbled, in true female fashion, directly into Anzl's waiting arms. Tera started as a spark caught in the faded curtains with a dull 'whump', and slid too swiftly through the opening, deliberately missing Anzl but catching her elbow a woody smack on the window frame as she dropped into the mulch and prickly dying plants arranged beneath the sill.

"Run for it," urged Anzl, chilly early-morning air whipping at the stiff, flat mess of his once-spiked hair. "Before it comes out."

A peculiar crackling hiss; and a scalding rush of blistering-hot air filled the air with a sulfurous stink as it rushed through the window in a haze of distorted air. Flames licked around the opening, already staining the walls black, providing an epic background for the massive PHAD as it exited the premises in a ball of red-tinged but rapidly cooling metal. After it straightened up and brushed a piece of smoldering fabric from its chassis, the robot retracted the weapon that had caused its arm to seem to over-large: a flamethrower of some sort, Tera guessed.

"Move," it ordered, indicating the black outline of Kiara's car. "The man drives. I guard the rear." To back up its statement, it again extended its bulky arm, which converted into a long-barreled, complicated affair of approximately five feet, so large that the robot was forced to use its free hand to support it. "I have sufficient battery supply to fire three rail gun shots, after which my weapon systems will go offline to conserve power. Do not attempt to follow a different course other than the one I prescribe you."

The rail gun began a low hum, mounting steadily in pitch. Under the firm impression that discretion was the better part of valor, everybody gingerly entered the vehicle and moved hastily to the seats which the machine indicated with ponderous movements of its free arm. As Anzl brought the engine to a near-silent growl, the indigo-blue armored construct dug claw-like fingers into the suddenly tender-seeming metal of the car with a horrible screech of twisting metal. About to protest, Tera silenced herself as she realized it was merely attaching itself, like a giant turret, so as not to fall when the car lurched forward under Anzl's grimly urgent foot upon its accelerator. All the same, Kiara would be having a heart attack. She winced as spiked braces on the rear of its legs knifed downward; anchoring it into the floor of the car so that it faced backwards in the rear seat with one arm leaned on the trunk.

"What…what the…what's it doing?" Alisa's voice began in a whisper, and rapidly mounted to a sound akin to the protesting steel as she half-stood to turn away from the passenger seat and stare at the robot.

To Tera's great relief, Anzl sharply yanked Alisa back into a sitting position and laid a restraining—or possible comforting—arm on her shoulder. Tera dashed her view away as the soldier's head rotated towards her to where she sat on the back seat just a foot or so away from it. "Do not jar me," it warned, and then commanded to Anzl, "Drive. We have approximately a six-minute head start as well as a distraction."

"Why? Is someone chasing us?" It was time that someone stopped being rebellious or scared and asked some questions.

"Your police," it replied readily in its scratchy mechanical drone. "While in forbidden sections of an Arena complex, you entered into combat against foreign creatures which do not exist on the Surface's ecosystem."

"I'll say they don't," Tera found the conversation surprisingly easy, as though she was speaking with stubby little Nemo instead of to a killing machine with a ridiculous tank cannon mounted on its arm. "All of the creatures at the Arena are built in labs specifically for the fighting."

"I am referring to the Mimigas who were transported into the basement tunnels. My team terminated the survivors."

Tera blinked. "Those giant hairy white things are called Mimigas, then."

"Frenzied Mimigas," it amended shortly, voice taking on a curious deadness as though reading out of a databank. "In a state of mad rage. In the natural they are easily dispatched." Its tone returned to normal. "They usually revert after injury, but the ones you engaged were permanently transformed. No Surface authority wishes for any news that creatures have been falling from the Island as of late. It has been years enough since the original Search and the failures to follow." She nearly heard bitterness in its voice, but found herself only imprinting this upon it. The static-laden growl it spoke in held no native emotions.

She pondered. "Where we're going, are we...will we meet up with the others?"

"My unit is ensuring that there is a clear route to our destination, and to secure a head start for the truck and its occupants. They will be protected." The rail gun wobbled dangerously as Anzl pulled a particularly violent turn.

Some jagged, cold thing in her chest faded quickly as though the spiky puffer fish lodged behind her heart had finally decided to take a nap. At least her parents were alive in the rattling old pickup, and the droids had full intention of preserving that condition.

* * *

_It was swiftly becoming unbearable. Spittle hung from the side of his pale grayish-pink lips, trickled down his blue-lined face. A tendril of illumination played across skeletal features; and a hand rose trembling to wipe his mouth. Head cocked, he observed the dampness on his palm with dead calm. _

_Dead. Death felt horribly like being alive. _

_The rage had long since subsided, and now only a dull, thumping ache in his chest continued to remind him that he was not dead yet. Rattling like the chains of the cages upstairs, his breath escaped in an almost-sob, but there was no strength for such expression and instead it only graveled away into a gurgle. _

_He held it in his narrow, age-twisted lap; looked deeply into its flat, baleful stare. It looked back at him, unblinking, though not unseeing. It no longer was confined to his head, as its influence touched him with its mindless intensity regardless of whether he wore it or not anyway. Yet the power was so weak now. It held onto him merely as a host, a golem himself, while the other drank of its power and doubtless grew strong and arrogant and never old. _

_Half-expecting the pointless, senile rage to flood over him again and turn his thoughts into jelly-like strings of useless hot fury, he was mildly relieved when it did not._

"_Misery," he whispered to himself. She would find the other. After all, if not for her blatant incompetence there would be nothing left to find, and thus it was her duty to atone for her mistake._

_He could still remember the day the Crown deserted him, and when he finally knew the other had survived. _

* * *

"Turn off here." barked the PHAD after the car had swung around two sharp turns in the side-road it had already directed Anzl onto. "Concentrate only on driving," it admonished as the young man craned his neck about to extreme angles in hopes of catching a glimpse of what exactly the robot was doing in the back seat. Beside it, Tera started abruptly as a distant siren scream met her senses. The police, already? Thankfully, Kiara's hijacked car could probably outstrip the aging magnetic levitation engines the remotely controlled police vehicles were equipped with.

Suppressing a growl of frustration as the chilly blue-white beams of the police lights flashed cold in the rear-view, Anzl wrenched his head around again and stared wildly at the back of the robot. "Police?"

"Drive. At our current speed, we should reach our destination in thirty seconds."

Thirty seconds? Bracing herself against the back of Anzl's chair, Tera lifted herself out of the seat and peered forward into the gloom of pre-dawn, but the battered road only greeted her inquisitive glances with pebbly roughness and the occasional flash of a reflector strip that had not been torn away by the elements or the heavy tires of cargo trucks. Whatever the PHAD hoped to reach, it certainly was not visible.

The tense posture of the muscles in Anzl's neck prompted Tera to quickly drop back to her position, already half-guilty at having annoyed him in the midst of his task. No need to screw anything else up. "Twenty-five seconds," warned the PHAD…no, the _soldier_…in the same calm monotone. Nothing about its design spoke of it being a Personal Household Assistance Droid; familiar terms would not serve to describe it any longer.

Anzl tossed the robot a desperate-eyed stare, teeth clenched together unevenly. "They're faster than us," he shouted over the increasing snarl of the car's engine. "This thing has a damned governor on it for city driving, I can't top 110!" Twisting almost in unison, the vehicle's other two human occupants wriggled about to face backwards in their chairs as well, squinting as hair flapped in their faces.

"They're manned," Tera murmured as the police grew rapidly in her vision. "Are we really all that important?"

"Un-manned police also are equipped with a governor," The soldier said. "At high speeds their reflexes are not sufficient. When was this vehicle first purchased?"

Tera looked bewilderedly from Alisa to Anzl. "The owner…she isn't with us. It was junked; her dad did the repairs himself."

"Good, they will not be able to lock it down manually. Five seconds."

The rail gun leveled on the two top-of-the-line maglev squad cars. Tera's eyes widened in shock as she was hit by the realizations that the robot meant to kill them regardless of their suddenly-recognized status as bearing living drivers; yet any words caught in her throat as the gun bucked smoothly in the soldier's carefully calibrated grip and a blindingly pale ray of bluish-white light spat from its angled muzzle.

Wisps of acrid smoke whisked away and both police continued in their mission, for the beam had missed; flying too low it merely tore a smoking horizontal gash in the road before the pursuers. They would simple float right over. Hair flapped in her eyes and distorted black spots danced in Tera's vision as she gripped the headrest she leaned on more tightly. Only three shots, the soldier had said.

The result of her forcedly serene glance at the robot surprised her, for it was already folding the gun into its arm again, and lowering itself to a sitting position. "Stop," it said.

With its one red eye hot in the passenger mirror above him, Anzl stopped the car.

* * *

**Word Count: **3517

Another chapter I had to split in two, as it was just too huge, hence its slightly shorter length. I also wanted a cliffhanger, so it's only about half the length of a normal one of my chapters. It still crested 3000 words though, so I find it satisfactory.

Critique is much appreciated.


	8. Until We're Safe And Sound

A new chapter in only...-drum roll-...less than three and a half months! I think that's a definite improvement, don't you? All two of you? All one of you? Thanks a million to anybody who still bothers to read/review, I hope you enjoy my long and overly-wordy ramble called _A Second Chance for Redemption_.

This was one of my favorite chapters to write yet for some reason, maybe because I'm finally getting to the heart of the story I've been planning for over the last three years.

Oh, and it introduces the first non-evil canon character. Even if the poor thing doesn't say anything.

Also, I finally got around to naming the stupid robots so they're easier to write about. Following Kax's _Doctor Who_ and _Star Trek _names for the Ankiel family cats, I've now got references to _Battlestar Galactica_, _Metal Gear Solid 3_, and _FLCL/Fooly Cooly_. Callix is such a dork.

* * *

_A Second Chance for Redemption_

A semi-original fiction

by Fusionmix

_Chapter 8_

†††

As though even they were reluctant to obey their given orders, the car's wheels crunched to a jerky stop, entirely disregarding the supposed smoothness which the electronic braking system theoretically provided them with. The low throb of maglev engines spiked suddenly; Tera dug her nails into the headrest from where she knelt backwards on the seat. Her hands throbbed, but the pain only briefly registered on the periphery.

The police passed over the ragged crater, and the sound abruptly ceased as though the two vehicles had been thrust underwater. Briefly, time slowed deceptively, and the sleek enforcers dipped downwards with all the urgency of a strawberry about to be dipped in a warm coating of chocolate. The elegance was shattered by physics and they fell, two ear-shattering, screeching chunks of crumpling steel and bulletproof nanoglass; and lodged rakishly in the makeshift ditch as their remaining forward momentum plowed the squad cars into what was left of the magnetic repulsors situated beneath the tarmac. Without said repulsors to keep the maglev automobiles aloft and in motion, there had been nowhere for them to go but down, and down hard.

Anzl emitted a choked snarl, shattering the mood of shock which followed in the wake of the cacophony. "_Stop!_" he screamed belatedly, realizing the significance of the robot's act only as it completed. "The hell is this? Stop!"

The blue-plated fighter in question had already left the sports car with a grunt amounting to "don't move", clumping with awkward but undeniable speed towards the two police, whose threatening alarms now sounded silly in the wake of the ignominious crash they had just experienced. The Soldier seized the first officer the moment the stoic-faced man clambered from his crushed shell, wrapping four-joined fingers harshly around his shoulder and forcing him down against the jagged edge of the crater. The policeman's legs scrabbled frantically as he tried to gain his own footing, rock bits and charred wire fragments shuffling around messily beneath his boots and clinking scratchily against the steel greaves of his captor. A rough heave as he was lifted clear of the ground and high into the thin early morning air solved this problem, leaving the indigo Soldier to glare the second emerging officer into submission next to the downed cars.

Watching the airborne man wave his limbs about pathetically brought a half-giggle hiccupping into Tera's throat. Sleep deprivation did nothing for empathy, and she watched the robot stuff both officers into one cramped car and solder the doors shut, smiling madly with a fiendish glee as the other two occupants of Kiara's hijacked vehicle stared stonily up the road ahead.

The robot experimentally tried out a few grips on the chassis of the police car, and actually _lifted _the battered husk a few feet into the air, head cocked awkwardly as it surveyed the jumble of human limbs inside. A quick shake proved that the makeshift prison would serve its purpose, but the robot went on to extend a drill from his transforming left arm and grind a series of small holes in its top, like a little boy punching air-holes in a jar of fireflies with a screwdriver. The car emitted a crunchy squeak as its carrier unceremoniously dropped it and turned to clank back through settling dust to the convertible.

Having sobered, Tera leaned out of the way for the Soldier to return to its spot beside her on the now-mangled seat. Recalling the blue droid's ability to jam signals, she piped up quickly before Anzl had a chance to press the ignition switch. "Will they be able to call for any help?"

"No. The device _you_ carry should function normally, however." With that answer, it looked to Anzl until the young man gunned the engine to a muted purr and addressed him this time. "You do not attempt any calls." He finally cast the flat red stare on Alisa. "That applies to you as well."

Experimentally, Tera withdrew her mother's phone from the pocket of her tattered jeans and gingerly flipped it open as not to snap the plastic against her throbbing palms, eyes remaining fixed on the Soldier all the while. When no objection rattled out of its aged voice modulator, she bent back to the glowing square and waited for the liquid crystal to flow back into the form of a screen. Shapeless light warped across its surface, rippling like water around a speck of grit, darkening at the edges, and finally blooming into color as the crystal hardened slightly, becoming firm enough to transform electronic impulses into coherent images.

Alisa scowled suspiciously out of the corner of her eye.

Only jealous, thought Tera, because the big scary robot isn't friends with her. Sleep deprivation not only drained empathy, but apparently downgraded language facility by a few notches. Now that the excitement was fading behind with each humming sigh of the tires beneath, weariness injected molten lead into her eyelids. They drooped. The phone shifted in stiffening hands, threatening to clatter to the floor of the car.

Except that a blinking notification on the screen immediately gathered up the weariness and tossed it into a bush, snapping washed-out eyes wide open. One text? Her sore fingers fumbled awkwardly on the sensitive screen, the surface of which felt like smooth, pliable ice. There was the return number, and the name beside it – Callix. He had texted. Someone else had a connection, her family was all right! Shading the screen from weakly pooling rays of pale, rising sunlight, she squinted at the blinking notice. It must be important, or else there would be no message. Elation gathering in fluttery tidbits beneath her loudly accelerating heart, Tera tapped the 'read' icon.

_Hey. I came up with names for the robots. Want to hear them?_

Her heart sputtered vaguely, skipping a beat in consternation. Fingers flying furiously across the virtual keypad, she spewed out an only semi-legible mass of wrath in stark black lettering, lips working silently as her view went black and all that was clear was a mist of frustration. Who gave a damn for what the robots were named, when….

Rather suddenly, she stopped. The mist cleared.

Backspace, realization. Obviously, if there _was_ time to give a damn for what to name a bunch of clunky, overgrown Personal Household Assistance Droids with morphing limbs; everybody was fine.

Smile.

_Sure. Fire away._

The note sent itself without delay or a hitch, and Tera turned her gaze to the sunrise behind them. Somehow, even as Alisa curled in a ball and Anzl hunched rigidly over the steering wheel and a giant robot with one eye and a transforming gun arm sat next to her, she knew that everything was going to work out.

Her brain agreed, adrenals closed off, and a few minutes later she was slumped ungracefully in sleep against the side of the car.

* * *

It was not until motion and the rush of cool morning air past her face ceased that Tera's eyes flicked opened and she yawned, completely indifferent to the unladylike nature of the noise. Sitting up, she rubbed at her eyes like a toddler awakening from a nap and took a deep breath. It smelled of wind and dust, nothing more. She sighed.

"Helicopter," Anzl said upon noticing her state of wakefulness. "Apparently there's a barricade ahead of us."

Tera inspected the purplish half-moons sunken beneath his eyes and mentally winced. The Soldiers had not let him sleep. "So we're taking a helicopter, then. That's—pretty cool."

To her surprise, he actually smiled exhaustedly. "Yep. Even better because I don't have to drive." A few moments passed, before his face flattened out once more. "Look, I'm sorry I blew up back there." He jerked his thumb up the road behind, gesturing as though the first hotel they had used during the 'exodus' was only a few meters away.

"I don't call that blowing up. You want to see blowing up, see my dad. I guess this means this isn't 'all my fault' anymore?" Another inside cringe. Why was her voice coming out so spiteful?

No reply.

From where it was parked in a wash of grit and ash-toned gravel, the vehicle seemed to pulse under the rising heat. In the distance, jagged lumps of mountain were piled along the horizon like gobs of blue-misted brownish-white fudge. Popping every door open concurrently, Anzl had to make a hasty snatch for Alisa's shoulder, as in her sleeping state she just about slid out onto the ground. "Sorry," he grunted to her. "Kiara can work the buttons in this thing better than I can."

"You're a better driver though." Tera noted, trying to atone for her previous snappishness.

"Ugh, shut up everybody," moaned Alisa, hugging onto her boyfriend's arm like a brunette leech. "I'm tired."

Only now did Tera find the seat beside her vacant. "Where's the Soldier?"

Anzl managed to turn his head to respond, while simultaneously allowing Alisa to use his chest as a pillow by wrapping both her arms up about the back of his neck. "On watch." He wrinkled one eyebrow and shifted in his seat as a knee jabbed him. "Ouch." The contortion of Alisa's body was an impressive feat.

Gingerly dismounting from the car, Tera teetered around on stiff legs, having sighted the robot in the distance. "Have fun with the yoga lessons. I'm going to see what's going on." She forged off through the brushy and scrubby weeds, which rasped around the worn fabric of her jeans. Aside from the bristles of grass, pudgy-limbed cacti blooming with blonde flowers dotted the rugged landscape; spikes on the brown earth with its thin layer of half-dead groundcover—a cactus itself. Her sandal-less feet hardly noticed until she ambled up in the Soldier's shadow and inadvertently burrowed her toes into what seemed to be a six-inch-tall ant nest.

With an expression which would be bordering on amusement were it capable, the indigo droid watched as she pranced about on one leg in an ungainly fashion, slapping at her foot and kicking up a fine mist of baked dust; it was only after a good thirty seconds of panicked yelping and scraping the offending limb through clumps of scratchy weeds that she calmed down and discovered that the ant mound had apparently been abandoned for a good long while. Tera shot a hasty glance at the heat-shimmer rising off of the hood of Kiara's stolen automobile, but the glare prevented any meaningful decision as to whether or not her graceless ant dance had been noticed.

"Um. Sorry?" she offered upon turning back to the robot.

"Explain."

"…never mind. Anyhow, what's the plan? Anzl said there would be a helicopter."

"The plans have been amended. We will drive further. The helicopter was originally to move only the cryostasis chamber, Scout unit, and woman."

"Nemo." Her mouth went dry as she re-thought the last word it had spoken; she scrubbed at an eye where a gnat had buzzed through her lashes. "Wait, my mom? Did she get hurt?"

"A mild hyperextension of the Achilles tendon. No lasting harm done, but she could be a liability to the safety of the rest of your party."

Relief. She sat down tentatively in its jagged, shortening shadow. "Why did the truck get sent ahead?"

"It is slower. Due to its modified cargo-bearing chassis, it cannot exceed 60 miles per hour. It also is able to traverse not only paved roads without the aid of magnetic levitation, but rough terrain as well. Three potential roadside impediments were eliminated by my squad." Its transforming arm whirred for a second, punctuating its meaning. "With our calculated delay, we should reach the rendezvous point within ten minutes of each other. It cleared the way for us."

"With my mom and dad and brother in it?" She half-stood.

"They were escorted by Soldiers and by the Gladiator. Do not forget that we remained behind to seal off a possible route of pursuit. Had I missed with the three rail-gun shots, we would certainly have been eliminated. Our purpose was in all actuality more dangerous." It shuffled in place, seeking more stable footing, and stopped for a second. Not skipping a beat, its head swiveled towards her. "Transmission intercepted. The barricade is broken, but we must hasten. Go to the vehicle." Stepping towards her, it stiffly pushed at her shoulder, turning her about until she faced the car and released her arm. "Go quickly. Have the man start the engine."

"Aren't we taking a helicopter?"

"Run." It repeated mechanically.

"Why…"

"I ordered you to run."

Tera nodded without further question. "Anzl!" she yelled, approaching the car. "Stop doing whatever and start the engine!" She ignored Alisa's glare—though the 'yoga lessons' were long over—and scrambled into the seat.

"I thought it said this was our 'destination'." Grumbling slightly, he coaxed the willing engine into a throaty hiss. Even as they began accelerating into the road, the Soldier leaped cleanly into the rear, carving additional ugly slashes in the once-pristine leather seats. Kiara's dad would be _pissed. _

…If he ever got the car back.

* * *

The mountains loomed up nearer and nearer over the next hour, until the car turned off the road and was among them, their bulk melting into the terrain and obscuring Old Route 40 as the vehicle jounced and jolted off the beaten trail. _Poor, abused suspension_. Tera winced as some unseen metallic component squeaked grittily upon being forced to drive the ex-racer up another jagged hillock. The air smelled fresh and thin; it would probably be chilly in winter, though right now the sun domed over them like a single hot light bulb in a small room.

Wonder of wonders, the robot managed to locate a charge station down a remote gravel boulevard, directing Anzl to pull the car into the tiny lot beneath a ratty maroon overhang. "We wait here."

"The, uh, fuel's pretty low," Tera noted, leaning over the driver's seat to point at the telltale gauge. "Do you plug it in like a normal car?"

Anzl shrugged helplessly. Help was on the way, however.

Smelling strongly of tobacco, a skinny Hispanic with a baseball cap pulled down to shade his face ambled up, shaking his head and waving a hand dismissively. "We have no gasoline for cars like these." He leaned one hand on the side of the car and shrugged apologetically. "Sorry. Anything else I can…." He paused. Delicately, the un-lit cigarette slipped from the corner of his chapped lips and came to rest in a clump of weeds; he had only just noticed that the bulky mass of blue steel in the rear seats was not, in fact, a pile of scrap metal. Something dawned in his eyes; he smiled crookedly and backed away in what looked as though it was meant to be a casual motion. "I'll give the…service station up the road a call. Stay right there. Just hold on."

He scuttled away like a grasshopper missing some essential limbs while rooting in his jeans pocket for his phone; he was either a supremely awkward man or one who made a habit of watching and emulating spastic retro cartoons from the early 2010's. "We don't _need _a service station!" Anzl shouted after him. When the man did not turn, he prepared to call again, when he broke off mid-bellow and ground a palm into his forehead. "He's getting the police, isn't he?"

"Yes. He has just reported the presence of three large rogue PHADs, two girls armed with black-market non-registered machine pistols, and a man carrying an assortment of illegal knives behind the wheel of a stolen vehicle modified for street racing. The call has _not_ gone through." If it had possessed a more vivacious and less morbidly serene set of implacable facial features, Tera supposed the network-jamming robot would have looked awfully smug.

With a disgusted groan, Alisa flung her door open and clomped unsteadily onto the charge station tarmac on wobbly limbs. "Anybody else need to use the restroom?"

Anzl wordlessly shook his head, intent on watching the animated flailing of the attendant as he undoubtedly continued to embellish his story. In spite of her best efforts to remain stern in their situation, Tera let a few poorly-muffled giggles escape to the surface. "Somehow I think I'm supposed to be really, really scared," she laughed. "But I can't help but think this is really, really funny."

She really should be scared. Blind, mindless terror was the only logical solution for a seventeen-year-old girl stuck in a ravaged car with a large robot and two people who may or may not have still been her friends and no idea where she was going. But Tera was so over logic. Gladiators in the vein of awful history documentaries, violently homicidal flying lunchboxes, undead animals nonexistent on Earth, and running away from law enforcement which could possibly be out to either kill or rescue her, all whilst running on a few hours of fitful sleep; was enough to keep reason pent up somewhere in a corner of her mind where it doubtless would awaken to scream at her later. There were still the slight matters of Derek being dead, and her dad being pissed, and Chris being comatose in a box, and her family _maybe _being in some other truck on the way to meet them, and Shawn _not _being dead…

…but watching a man pour out his panic into a phone call which would never reach its destination somehow cracked her up. The mirth was hot in her stomach, like a pot kept too long over the burners, and it bubbled out and over as the lid no longer served its purpose, and she laughed out loud until her voice broke and she giggled mentally on the torn leather cushions.

It wasn't until the pungent reek of diesel fuel filled Tera's lungs that she coughed, made a face, and sat up to see Anzl break into a wide grin. A battered blue truck with a halfway-unfolded indigo Soldier in the back snarled up the gentle slope and ground to a halt a few yards away.

Laura shrieked a lot in between limping about stoically, and cried on Tera's shoulder; Eric asked too many questions, and wondered what was wrong with the attendant who had run inside the station; and Callix just smiled cheekily. "Did you think of a name for that one yet?"

"The one what?"

He shook his head. "The robot."

Eric threaded a hand through his disheveled hair. "You've talked?"

"Texted," Tera corrected quickly. "Kax thought up some names for the robots, and…" She broke off, because her father wore a face that either meant his head was about to become a miniature fusion warhead, or he was on the verge of a repeat of her own paroxysmal giggle fit.

"You talked…about _naming the robots_. We're being abducted, and you talk about _names for robots_."

She let her eyes follow Shawn as he drifted in the background, by way of distraction, and then sheepishly turned back to Eric. "Ah…yeah."

Despite her being braced for the explosion she felt to be inevitable, she still felt the clammy, pedophilic fingers of dread trail down her spine from neck to tailbone when the man looked straight past her to his son without uttering a word. "And you didn't tell me you were in contact?" The tendons in his neck stretched taut.

Kax opened his mouth, but before he could speak, the group was interrupted by a raking scream from inside the service station. Without even bothering to open his door, Anzl vaulted out of the car and set off at a berserk speed towards its source, leaving a spray of grit to ping against the side of the vehicle as he sprinted off. Now a second scream shattered the dozy summer Arizona air, this time lower-pitched and much more agonized. Tera stared, aghast, as a stream of muffled noise spewed from the station's door when Anzl wrenched it open. Had Alisa been hurt?

But it was the girl in question who met Anzl at the door and clung to his middle, half-sobbing and half-cursing against his sweaty t-shirt. Tera slowly dismounted the automobile and hesitantly meandered towards the two, with other members of the party trailing after her. Much to her bewilderment, Anzl caught the laughing bug and burst out into a sudden mule-like guffaw. "You did what, Alisa? Seriously?" He gently pulled away and peered into the building.

"Um…what happened?" Tera queried.

"She just broke that service guy's elbow!"

"What did he _do_?"

"Whatever he did, I know I'm not doing it. 'Lisa, you can let go of me now."

Anzl's girlfriend's face contorted while remains of mascara streaked down her cheeks and smudged on his shirt. She managed to mumble something entirely nonsensical before she dissolved into a shaking mess against him once again.

Shawn had slipped past everyone during Alisa's flare-up, and now emerged towing a whimpering man with a baseball cap clutched in his good hand. Flint-eyed Anzl turned on the Hispanic instantly, clutching the unfortunate attendant by the front of his top and stopping whatever words might come in their tracks. A button popped from its thread and jittered around on the tarmac as Anzl steered his hostage off for questioning.

The ensuing discussion, from what Tera could hear of it; was very one-sided, mostly revolving about Anzl growling questions while the charge station employee did a remarkably good job of keeping calm and answering. Tera felt that eavesdropping was out of place in this situation, and wandered away to inspect the blue truck while the issue was resolved.

Hearing Kax drifting up behind her, she waved vaguely in the direction of the three robots he had been travelling with. "Which one is which?"

"Well," he rubbed his hands together dramatically. "That one with the visor and no eyes is Canti. The one with the red eye in the middle of his face and the claws is Cylon, and that less bulky one with the white on its chassis is Boss."

"Where do you even get these names?" Tera walked in a circle around the truck in order to peer into the windows.

"Just ancient media; the kind you like to blatantly ridicule whenever I try and show it to you. What's your robot's name?"

She huffed a frustrated sigh. "_You _think of one. I'm not good with names."

"Nah, you're just bad at making decisions." Turning towards the Soldier, he waved one arm and cried, "Hey! What's your name? You need a name!"

The droid clanked over to them, its oversized weapon arm cradled to the side. "My squad notified me of your choice of callsigns. They are not practical."

"What do you call them?" Tera chanced a question.

"Their Force/Production Order numbers are Two-07, Six-14, and Six-02."

"Then 'Canti', 'Cylon', and 'Boss' _are _practical," Kax pursued eagerly. "They're much quicker to say and…"

"Speech is an organic method of communication. Exchanging data via contextual network is much more efficient. Though by your reasoning, this argument has been won in your favor. Two-07 may be known as Cylon, Six-14 as Boss, and Six-02 as Canti if that is more efficient for you."

Tera suppressed a smile. "What do we call you, then?"

The Soldier whirled to face her with frightening alacrity, saluting, as with a grating whine of servos it inclined its grotesquely battered skull-face and single operational eye to watch her. "I am Leader of Force Nine, Force/Production Order designation Nine-00." The bizarre reciting-from-a-textbook tone and stiffness fell away from it. "We depart for our final rendezvous point in twenty minutes." It moved awkwardly, like an actor over-emoting in a poorly-written play, as it ponderously turned about and plodded off.

"Um, wow?" Tera said, as soon as it had moved away. "_Somebody_ failed their A.I. coherency test."

"I _think_ we'll call him 'Nine' for sake of simplicity," stated Kax drily, twirling a oaty-smelling weed stalk between his fingers as stray breezes pulled at his baggy jeans. "But…it's pretty strange."

"Hmm?"

"Force Nine. If the robots are numbered by what 'force' they're in, and by their production number, then the first robot made in the first force would be called One-01, right? And the second One-02?"

"I follow."

"Then why is his 'squad' made of three random robots from forces Two and Six?"

Tera shrugged, somewhat stupidly, because it hurts to think when one is exhausted.

* * *

Wired from having reunited with her family, and reassured now that the black car was once again following its aged navy-blue leader, Tera was having a difficult time not asking ridiculous amounts of unwanted questions. According to Nine, they would be bypassing a police barricade and ditching the car on a dilapidated mountain road before climbing to a plateau which would act as a makeshift helipad. Tera had never ridden in a helicopter before, but was glad that they _all _would be taking one as opposed to just her mom and Nemo and Chris-in-a-box. Hopefully, this finally final destination of supposed finality would actually _be _their ultimate target.

Nine's constant terse lying about when and where they were going had gotten old, but Tera could not ask him anything else now, since Kiara's molested racer was currently being watched over by Boss instead. The partially white-painted Soldier was even less of a conversationalist than Nine had been, and Tera gave up trying to be friendly after the second question she posed resulted in a rough shove and a cold order to be silent.

Boss's robotic twang was an octave or so higher than Nine's. Maybe it was supposed to be a she.

* * *

_In the absence of a golem and a nagging witch, silence snuffled in through cracks in aged stones, finding the places where vines thrust their way into nooks and crannies in order to bring him the sound of nothingness. His domain was one of uneasy quiet, a run-on sentence punctuated by the occasional earthy rumble. He shifted numbly, willing the rage to burn again so he could follow it. _

_The beacon had gone dark. He felt nothing now._

_Doubtless the Crown as well was impatient, irked with the distance of its chosen mate and with the rotten state of its host. "Don't fret," he said, though no sounds escaped his quivering throat. "You parasite. You almost make me jealous." _

_

* * *

  
_

"We're climbing up there?"

"Sure!" Kax answered his sister, peering up through the evening fog to where the group intended to diverge from the road and clamber up a mostly-sheer cliff. "It'll be fantastic. Wonder if Nine'll let me use a camera?"

"You want to take pictures while trying not to die."

"Yeah, and if I do fall I'll click it beforehand to get a great picture of myself with my skull smashed in. I can see the headlines: 'First Man To Take Self-Portrait Of His Dead Self From Beyond The Grave! Mysterious…'"

Tera began to laugh, but Alisa glowered at her brother and snapped, "Stop it, I'm scared enough."

Forcing a poker face, Tera turned away from her agitated sort-of-friend and let her eyes trace a makeshift route up the cliff. Branch there. Slippery-looking rocks to avoid _there_. Shawn doing chin-ups on a bristly tree which looked as though it would snap at any moment over there. He was obviously quite strong, and his arms did not visibly tremble as he lifted himself and then lowered his feet back to the ground. Mentally, she smacked herself; of course a Gladiator would be fit.

Very fit. Somehow, her eyes adopted the characteristics of a pair of ground sloths, and became for all intents and purposes immobile as something dawned on the 17-year-old girl.

Kax was a skinny boy; his geeky habits had inherited for him his father's slight physique. Anzl was constructed with the lean, compact build of a runner. In Marty's case, porcine comparisons could be made without too much inaccuracy.

What struck Tera upside her much-in-need-of-a-shower head was the fact that she really had never seen a man who _had _to be well-built. She found something disgusting voyeuristic in the way her gaze latched onto Shawn's back as he moved, onto each muscle and sinew as they flexed both together and independently like a herd of tightly-meshed animals running across a plain while viewed from above; but the trance was not broken until he seemed to detect her looking and dropped from the branch in mid pull-up. "Do you need something?" He said it simply, flatly, _normally_, as though he were asking a random elderly passerby if they required assistance in crossing a busy street or carrying a bag of groceries.

It was a day of epiphanies.

She was reminded of _his _face then—the face of a dead man whose features matched those of the Gladiator before her, and her vocal cords tied themselves in a knot. Somehow, over the course of the year after 'her' Gladiator had died, she had cemented into her mind a terrifically romanticized notion of what the man would have looked like had he not been missing an eye and had a lot of his own blood smeared over him. No, he did not have _black _hair; it was _ebony_. His eyes were not dark brown, they were a tragic chocolate. _His_ face was chiseled from a light-colored wood.

Shawn, who stood before her now, had black hair, dark brown eyes which were about as expressive as any other set of eyes (i.e. they were _not _despairing mirrors into his soul), and a flattish face with a beaky nose and a haze of black stubble all over it that looked more tired and drawn than handsomely chiseled or tragic. When her Gladiator was dead, she could fabricate her own little make-believe ideas as to what he looked like, what he acted like, and what it would have been like if his first cracked "Hey" had been directed at her over a lunch table at school and not from where he lay trickling blood through gashes in gaudy golden-bronze armor.

Shawn was not her Gladiator; he was his own man, because 'her' Gladiator had only existed in whatever stupid self-serving fantasies she had made up in order to cause petty, groundless melodrama about the death of a total stranger. Gee, this was just fantastic. Somehow, she was about to burst into tears in front of her family, acquaintances, and a guy who unwittingly had just broken her heart by simply being alive.

"Uh, no," she said mechanically in belated answer to his question. "Just zoning out."

Nine rescued her from further discomfort by clumping into the center of the group and clanging his fist off the side of his head for attention. "Two-07 and I will lead. Six-14 and Six-02 will bring up the rear. Climb."

Six-14 Boss and Six-02 Canti circled behind like border collies ordered to keep a group of goats in formation while the leader Nine and Two-07 Cylon led the way. Her previous mental engagement shattered, Tera forwent strategic thinking regarding the ordeal and simply focused on movement.

Roughly ten minutes later, she left a damp, sticky patch on everything her hands grazed against, and had long-since lost her remaining flip-flop. Her senses rang of gravel crunching and weird Arizona flora and an obnoxious bird somewhere and the metal tang of blood from her burning palms. Her grip literally slid as scabs were sloughed off against each hand-hold. Dimly, through the blood pounding in her ears, she was aware of Kax chattering away to Anzl.

"…yeah, and then Boss slugged his lights out and Nine injected him. He won't be able to tell anyone which way we went."

"Talking…about that store clerk guy?" Tera forced it out through gritted teeth and flinched as some miniscule grain of debris—probably a twig—bit into her palm.

"Yep." He popped the 'p'.

Alisa amended the 'store clerk' phrase with some unpleasant adjectives, to which Anzl chuckled. "Hey, he was just doing his job. We scared the crap outta him, let me tell you."

Tera paused, briefly, allowing them to pass her as she sucked muggy evening air. Whatever happened to cold desert nights?

"You okay, sweetie?" Her mother had caught up, right next to Eric where he assisted her due to her sprained ankle.

"Peachy." She made a point of not making eye contact with her dad.

"Climb," reminded Boss in her supposedly-feminine snarl, as the statement was backed up with an authoritative hand gesture from blocky Canti. Tera noticed, for the first time, that Nemo had been shut off and folded to Boss's shoulders, and Chris' cryobox attached to Canti's back. No wonder they were climbing more slowly than Nine and Cylon.

The three humans did follow the order, though, and they climbed.

Shawn, who had been neck-and-creepy-skeletal-helmet with Nine, shouted down unexpectedly, "It gets less steep here. The plateau is maybe just fifty feet to go, now."

His voice twisted something in Tera's stomach, but this news was good. Heartened, she choked down the screaming bite in her hands and scrabbled up even with Kax and Anzl, panting hard. A enormous and slightly less-wizened bush thrust up through the rocks up and to the left of her; it would make an excellent climbing assist for the final push.

Unfortunately, it turned out to have eensy-weensy thorns. This normally would not be a massive problem, but upon gripping it Tera's left hand decided to mutiny and lit her brain up in several different places, and a strangled squeak wormed out of her throat. Thankfully nobody's ears heard it over something Eric asked about the abandoned cars.

More dangerously, the enormous and slightly less-wizened bush began pulling out of the rocks with her one hand caught in it and the other gingerly gripping its stalk where it did not have prickles, leaning her at an awkward angle _away _from the overgrown hill/cliff. Some heavy shape in the shrub shifted; perhaps it was a root formation of a long-gone tree, because what felt like a vine draped across her face and she quickly released the bush and made a desperate grab at it with both hands.

It was not a vine.

It was a scarf; faded green and caked with grit, and she screamed properly this time until her lungs cramped because its owner came sliding out of the bush on top of her, and his skin was horribly luke-warm, and his black hair was full of irate red ants, and now she was falling backwards off a mountain with a dead boy in a green scarf and dark tank-top on top of her.

The air hummed.

* * *

_His head snapped up, sagging cheeks nearly flapping as he bared toothless, rotting gums. _

_Oh yes. _

_There you are. _

_

* * *

  
_

Word Count: **5831 **

CANON CHARACTER TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111

Here's to another shorter update time. And my chapters are back to their normal 10-11 page goodness.


	9. Not Gonna Get Us

Five and a half months of procrastinating, writers' block, oneshots, and studying for various exams later, I present to you Chapter 9 of ASCfR.

Given that nobody wants to read through a 50000 word backlog to figure out what's going on so far, I have some notes for you.

The Ankiel family consists of Eric, Laura, Callix/Kax (15) and Tera (17). Tera's two important and plot-relevant friends are Anzl (18) and Alisa (19). They are traveling with four Soldier-class robots: Nine-00 (Nine), Six-02 (Canti), Two-07 (Cylon), and Six-14 (Boss). Back at the Gladiator arena, when she became trapped in the basement, Tera made the acquaintance of three Gladiators: Shawn (Rigel), Chris Rainer (callsign not yet given), and Derek Foreman (callsign not yet given). Chris was injured when he tripped over Tera, and has been frozen in a cryogenic stasis box to stave off infection. Derek's slave bracelet incinerated him, and he is deceased. A very minor character is the Ankiel family's Personal Household Assistant Droid (abbreviated to PHAD), Nemo.

All of those are real names - yes, Callix is a name. It's pronounced KAY-lix or KYE-lix. His last name Ankiel is pronounced ANG-keel or ANG-kale. Anzl is pronounced ON-zle. Like Hansel, except different :P

To conclude my notes, I will be doing some minor rewrites of the first three chapters, as they are of a markedly inferior quality to the newer ones. I also have several plotholes to fill in or amend.

Extensive thanks go out to **cheatscanner**, **M. Magpie**, and especially **Cedric Bale**, who has stuck with this overly-wordy ramble for a while. Every bit of incentive helps. Without further ado...

* * *

_A Second Chance for Redemption_

by Fusionmix

_Chapter 9: Not Gonna Get Us_

†††

_We're gonna run, nothing can stop us,_

_Not even the night that falls all around us._

_Soon there will be laughter and voices_

_Beyond the clouds, over the mountains…_

Harshly the air thrust itself from her lungs, leaving her ribs to clench around a lungful of nothing as a splayed hand slammed into the small of her back and a red haze mingled with slashes of pained light. She acutely became aware of a strained grunt as ragged, heavy breathing dusted against her ear. "Grab on," hissed the voice of Shawn, and she could feel his arm shaking wildly as he prevented her falling further. "Grab! There!"

She couldn't breath. The pressure of his digging fingers and the inexplicably crushing weight of the corpse on her chest squeezed her diaphragm until it felt like she was trying to inflate a balloon. She helplessly swallowed instead of inhaling. With a revolting hollow slithering sound as he ground through the gravel, the dead boy shifted when she writhed to grip the rock face. Shawn's grip inadvertently slid up her back along with her shirt as she gulped in a massive gust of air and lunged to latch on to the grip the Gladiator had pointed out, not even feeling the protest of her skinned hands. She had to hold on. Falling off a cliff was not an option after surviving a brawl with alien zombie monsters in a basement.

"Tera!" shouted Eric, a few seconds late, because now the heavy body was propped between his daughter and the cliff and thus ceased to impinge her breathing. He commenced half-climbing, half-sliding towards her.

Shawn slowly withdrew his hand, hesitating, (probably, she thought deprecatingly, in order to make sure she wasn't about to swoon or do something else stupid or useless). Now that she was no longer in imminent danger of dying, Tera blushed. "Uh, sorry," she tried to say, but it caught in her throat behind a bubble. Not the time. Not the time, dumbass damsel in distress. Not the time. Repeating this mantra to herself, she focused on the cold corpse resting against her hips. The eyes were completely dead; glassy black orbs stared somewhat crookedly ahead above a small nose and soft mouth all set in the round Asian face rimmed with tufty black hair, skin far too pale and rubbery and bordering on white. "There's a dead guy in my lap." It was little more than a hoarse whisper.

Still breathing roughly, the black-haired man carefully moved around her and motioned her to bow outwards a little for him to fit an arm between her and the cliff and wrap it around the body. He gasped suddenly with the weight of it as the corpse proceeded to slip right out of his grasp and tumble down with a horrible rushing series of dull thuds, only to be stopped by Canti, who effectively copied Shawn's earlier maneuver with Tera and caught it with one broad, blocky hand.

"Are you all right?" Eric now, right next to her, brushing hair out of her face and looking as though he would throttle the mountain. "Thanks…Shawn, right? Thank you."

The Gladiator nodded mutely, politely, and rested his forehead against the cool cliff face for a few moments before he huffed a sigh and clambered up to where a wide-eyed Kax and an open-mouthed (obviously worried) Laura and impassive Nine regarded Tera. She wanted to cry. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to not keep getting people worried or hurt because of her universal incompetence. Despite herself, she half laughed, half bit back a sob, and forced a too-bright smile. "I'm okay. Sorry about that."

"Don't say sorry, your hands make it hard to climb. Do you need help? And what's this with somebody dead? Eric's piercing brown eyes were too sharp to look into.

Tera replied haltingly. "I don't know; Canti—the robot with the wide visor face panel thing—has him. He's got no eyes, Dad, and now he got ants on me—" she broke off quickly as her voice wobbled, threatening to crack, and brushed a few straggling ands off her arm; she faced away from him into the gentle Arizona night breeze. It smelled musty and sweet, of dirt and cactus and dusk, and after a few deep breaths of it she was able to focus again on her position and on the muscle strain of holding herself there. "I'm fine," she grunted.

Her left hand shifted, lancing fire through all the nerves on that side of her body, and the moment she recommenced her ascent; her legs reminded her that they were not in shape and that sufficient sleep had not been something on her agenda for the last few days. Like some spiny weed, a tendril of pain sprouted in her Achilles' tendons, lethargically worming its way up her calves and sinking one thorn after another into the muscles until it reached the backs of her knees and blossomed into a numb, stabbing ache. She could actually smell the blood from her hands now, its scent muddy and metallic in her nostrils as sweat trickled into a scrape on her cheek and proceeded to spread an acidic burn beneath her eye. "No, I'm not." She sighed in frustration. "I'm sorry…"

Eric had slowly accompanied her labored steps. "Shh, you don't have to be sorry. I should be sorry for…eh, never mind. We can talk later." Her dad spared her a small smile, and then furrowed his brow as he cast about the mountain face for some way to assist his daughter.

In the end it was Cylon who remedied the dilemma, leaving his place by Nine's side on the oh-so-close plateau to ponderously clank down level with her at a speed surprising for his heavy frame. Compressing himself to the vertical surface, he motioned her to climb onto his back. "Do not hesitate," he ordered, modulated voice a tremulous bass. "I am capable of transporting more than 634.79 lbs in this manner." And with that he clattered back up.

It was not, Tera mused, unlike riding a horse. Or perhaps it was like getting a piggy-back ride, though it had been so many years since she had last indulged in one as a child that she couldn't pull the various memories together in her sleepy brain cogently enough to verify. "Bye, Dad!" she sang out softly, hoping to add some levity to the situation as he brought up the rear of the group, his jacket fluttering awkwardly in the breeze.

"We have reached the plateau." A more vehement gust of wind virtually snapped Cylon's stilted Captain Obvious words away, and Tera shuddered suddenly when it wicked away the dampness across her back and tossed her greasily snarled hair into her eyes as she peered up. The stated destination silhouetted itself picturesquely against the velvet, star-speckled indigo above; she heaved a gargantuan breath of relief once she finally stood on the robot's head, rested her upper body over the lip, and rolled herself onto flat-ish ground before any of the others could move to assist. After the idiocy of nearly falling off, she felt the need to redeem her actions at least slightly, though her arms wobbled limply as she did.

Shrugging off her parents, she proceeding to crook her elbow around a securely planted tree (she testing this before taking hold) and lean out over the drop a tiny bit. Slightly taken aback, she stepped out of the way hastily with a mumble of apology as Boss leveraged herself onto the plateau and roughly deposited a folded Nemo next to the startled girl. "Six-02 cannot climb while detaining a package." And then she vanished back down the cliff in order to free up Canti's arms from the corpse.

"You're gushing vital fluids." Kax pointed out matter-of-factly, jabbing a finger at her crimson hands and the filthy, dirt-adulterated liquid slowly pooling at the tips. "Ouch. That's less than optimal for taking up rock climbing, huh."

Well, there was Kax's attempt at sympathy. Upon second thought, it was superior to Laura's; as she promptly whipped off her socks and made Tera wear them like gloves. "And don't say anything about foot germs. You probably have much worse from rolling around in an Arena basement and sleeping in scummy motels."

"I…" was all Tera managed, waving her sock-clad digits bewilderedly, before her mother limped smartly to the edge and assisted Eric in gaining his footing with the others. The girl sighed yet again and shivered, looking off into the night. Thankfully the sun had only just set, or the climb would have been rendered unfeasible in the gloom. Six-02 Canti, demonstrating a use for his oversized face plate, flickered once or twice before a soft electric buzz whirred around his head and the plate snapped to a bright blue-white luminescence. He dumped his burden and roughly rolled it over with a lurching shove from his foot.

Everyone pressed in around the body. For a brief moment Tera was reminded of when Shawn's lookalike died. Then she pushed the mental image away and asked, "What's wrong with his eyes?"

Cylon answered. "It is deactivated. The spinal column has been fractured, and neural links terminated. Fall impact has led to a power leak. It cannot be reactivated."

"Wait, it's a robot?" That was Anzl's incredulous rumble.

Alisa shivered quickly and latched onto her boyfriend's arm. "How do you tell? He could just have been—sitting there—for a few days. Ugh."

Six-14 Boss shoved a goggle-eyed Kax out of the way and gathered the corpse's black tank top in her claws before she jerkily ripped it away with one harsh movement. And there, like a damning tattoo, was an oversized bar-code emblazoned on the abraded rubber and plastic synthetic skin, where white components and a shimmer of steel peeked through and winked in the dancing beam of Canti's headlamp as it narrowed, reddened, and vanished over the bar-code. The Soldiers remained still for scant seconds as Tera estimated that the light ray was scanning the code, before Canti's light snapped back into visible spectrum brilliance. Kax rubbed his chin, where neglected teenage fuzz blossomed skuzzily, and grinned daftly at the dead robot boy.

"So, Callix," Tera used his full name to annoy him, "What are you going to name this one?" Tera wearily jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow to signify the rhetorical question, and winced when the motion jarred her hand. Relief at the general situation prevented it from hurting much; words could not describe just how glad she was that nobody _else _had decided to die.

The shock of Canti suddenly switching off his headlamp completely prevented Kax from answering, plunging the group into abject blackness as their eyes struggled to adjust. Boss straightened up with a dull metallic whine from where she loomed over the robot boy, and imperiously brushed everybody back. "The helicopter is on its way." She intoned snappishly. Tera found herself reminded of Kiara in a bad mood, which in turn brought on a fit of mildly nausea-inducing panic regarding a certain trashed black convertible. As though recognizing her lapse in attention, the big white Soldier clanked two of her fingers together next to the girl's ear in an awkward mockery of a snap before she continued to address everybody in a louder and more obnoxious voice, "Do not use electronic devices! Do not speak! You will not be harmed! Any questions you may have _will _be answered once we reach our destination!" And then as if apologizing for the onslaught of high-decibel information, satisfied with the pained expressions on her human audience's faces, she placidly finished with, "We are sorry for the inconvenience."

Kax mumbled morosely, "Her name is all wrong."

His sister snorted in response. "Fits just fine to me." It was easy to be cocky with Callix, especially when she didn't understand what he meant.

"Remember I told you about that old game with the...eh, never mind. Think she'd let me change her name now?"

Had the Soldier been in possession of actual eyes instead of blank, faintly phosphorescent slits imbedded in the—leering? Glaring? Whatever it was, it wasn't friendly—angular expanse of her/its face, she would have rolled them. "Do not speak!" she half-shrieked, and convulsed abruptly, neck snapping to the left so hard the side of her helmet-like skull caromed off a bulky shoulder plate and jarred itself upright again. "SPRECHEN SIE NICHT!" she continued in badly garbled German, eventually shifting into something that could have been Japanese, Russian, Chinese, or a combination of all three.

Anzl and Eric pulled their Protective Men acts and edged in front of the others, while the normally functioning Soldiers regarded Boss with something akin to impassive disdain. "Close your eyes." Nine warned nonchalantly as his left arm expanded, parts shuffled about like crazed monorails, and then locked into place with a cheerful click as he rammed what looked like an oversized tuning fork into the malfunctioning droid's face. The resulting arc of lightning rang in Tera's senses; she had not shut her eyes quickly enough.

Every human present slammed hands over their ears when Boss _screamed_, a wrenching, ululating note like a blend of distortion from somebody shouting too loudly into an overly sensitive microphone mingled with the earsplitting shriek of audio feedback. Tera could actually feel the sound frequency stab into her gut as her eyes swam with black spots and an echo of Boss's wail bounced around in her hollow-feeling skull. Already her temples burned with the dreadful telltale signs of an oncoming headache of epic proportions.

"I apologize for the disturbance," the robot ground out to Alisa, preventing protest of his actions. "Six-14 will come around quickly."

Perhaps sharing his son's tendency to accidentally defuse the mood of a situation, Eric wrinkled up his nose comically. "Is something rotting?"

"It smells like our garden after a freeze." Kax pointed out, quietly, just in case Nine decided to uphold Boss's 'make no sound' policy. But judging from the robot leader's reaction, sound was okay as long as it was not particularly loud.

Considering this, Tera took a deep breath, and then regretted it as a cloying stench slithered its way up her nasal passages and settled uneasily in her lungs. The air held a faintly stagnant, ripe aroma; a chilly stink identical to the noxious qualities of rotting summer flowers after winter's first heavy-handed blow. "It can't have frozen recently."

"No duh, it's Arizona in the middle of frickin' summer." Alisa scowled. "Smells a little like when we had a dead raccoon in our attic. Makes you get light-headed, it's so nasty."

"The scintillating sensation of sniffing Sharpies." Kax amended her elementary phrase in an admirable imitation English accent which would have been funny, except it only served to remind Tera of Chris. Hopefully he was all right.

What was this, anyway? Was it fate that all inevitably led to self-condemnation? Or was she simply becoming existential due to lack of sleep and proper hygiene and the fact that all of the food she had eaten in the last three days had involved sodium and grease and crackly plastic packaging?

* * *

"_There you are." He says it out loud._

_She was not expecting this from where she hovered, half-dozing, in a bubble over the Throne. "Are you sure, my lord?" There is shock in her voice, mingled with slightly apprehensive anticipation._

"_I should hope I am not yet entirely useless, Misery. For a moment, I had found him. Already the beacon fades."_

"_The mimigas have been retrieved."_

"_The distance will make it impossible to hold them together in their state. Three days are not enough to heal them. Bring me others from the Cage."_

_She nods her eager assent. Now, in the moments when he and the object which she is bound to channel the same desires, she can feel at ease. In these moments, he and the Crown are one and the same being, and that makes everything so much simpler. _

_The air hums, she is gone; the air hisses, she returns. "They are less than ten, my lord."_

"_Ho ho ho…" and now he holds the Crown "…is that so? I suppose the others will require more extensive reanimation, but these will do."_

"_And it will not be a strain?"_

"_You think me so weak?"_

"_No, my lord."_

"_Tend to Balrog. Ensure he is prepared to carry out the plan."_

"_Yes, my lord." Every time, it becomes easier to say._

_She does linger for a while, half-expecting him in his new-found confidence to rise from the Throne and enthusiastically piece the dingy messes of desecrated fur and stained bone together by hand, but leaves when he merely lifts the Crown to his brow and allows the red motes of chemical-scented light to complete the job for him. Or she could see it another way, see the Crown latching itself to his quivering hands, drawing them upwards to crawl ponderously from them to his head and bite down around his skull and wear him. There, there come the phantom tentacles and limbs and twisting protuberances and empty black sclera of empty black eyes that defy the space of a mortal psyche, and thus only flicker in the edges of her immortal periphery._

_Not that this is a novelty; she saw this with Miakid, with Annachponae, as each hunted down his predecessor in order to claim the power and the horror as his birthright, and in turn was betrayed. Had they learned nothing from stories? _

_Each as genre-blind as the next. _

_She goes to check on Balrog, but also because she does not want to see the shades of what her master should have become had not…_

_A beat. _

_A pause._

_She goes to check on Balrog._

* * *

Interrupting the growing silliness, Nine cast his narrow red 'eye' over the plateau in a cursory inspection. "There is sufficient room for the helicopter to land here."

Anzl and Alisa let out a pair of tired whoops, and the former tried a half-hearted fist pump. "Stop it," said Alisa. "You're being too energetic."

"We can't keep up," added Kax with a direly straight face.

His father snorted out a laugh, and Shawn smiled goofily, but the ex-Gladiator was otherwise preoccupied with slowly dragging his line of vision around like a cat in a hail of autumn leaves, unsure of what to look at while still maintaining a sort of stoic dignity.

Tera watched the young man surreptitiously. It was a little like peering through the bleary glass of a store window at the lingering price tag and display stand of an item which was no longer on the shelves. Here in the gloom she could let her confused little self have its confused little fantasies which defied coherency, and wish that somehow she could simply ask him how he died the first time. If that even had been his first death, judging from the unnerving post-fight ramble at the arena when Derek and Chris had sent her to find him. How had Derek not noticed him sprawled out on that crappy cot in his undershirt and ill-fitting black pants anyway?

Sprawled out on a cot. Hmm. And yes, those black pants could certainly be defined as roguish with their baggy fit. It would be very hard _not _to notice, though…

Yikes. What was this? He wasn't even that good-looking.

From the neck up. Though mentally photoshopping her Dead Fantasy Gladiator of the Gorgeous Ebony Locks over his own face would certainly…

Crap. What time of the month was it, anyway? Leaping at the opportunity of a distraction from the unconventional nature of her thoughts, the girl fumbled her mother's phone out of her pocket and checked the date. August 7th, 2082. Ok then. She was eternally thankful for not having to worry about ladies' hormonal cycles on top of everything, she wished that Shawn would suddenly do something so absolutely repulsive that whatever latent attraction her repressed brain felt for him would fade. After all, Dead Fantasy Gladiator—DFG would make for an acceptable, if unpronounceable, acronym—certainly was nothing like what Shawn had turned out to be. This was creepily reminiscent of the time Kiara had launched into a drooling rant over a computer-generated character in yet another of her old films, except this time the logical side of Tera was nattering with _herself_ as the target rather than a starry-eyed friend. DFG was fictional.

Grasp at air and hold nothing.

"Are you sure you're all right? Staring into space like that; sure you don't have a concussion?" Perhaps Eric felt guilt for the desperate lecture he had blasted into her face on that chilly balcony of the first musty hotel. His daughter shook her head, first slowly, then more emphatically to drive the point home that she certainly was fully conscious despite lack of sleep.

Guilt again, cue dramatic synthesized organ. Were they all guilty? Anzl had apologized, in his blunt sort of way, for his accusations. Alisa probably agreed with the sentiment, but Tera found herself more than worthy of their claims. Bask in the ruefulness for now. She got Chris injured and her entire family and two sort-of-friends caught up in a ridiculous science fiction movie plot involving robots with transforming gun arms who stole cars and blew up public roads and climbed mountains. Of course she was licensed to feel guilty. And now her mother, over-extended Achilles tendon at all, had loaned her _socks _and was ambling around barefoot, sensible tennis shoes dangling from their ties grasped in one hand.

Tera let the disgust at herself well in the hollow of her stomach, envisioning a gaping pit. Rather a tornado, to scream down walls and emotions and pick up anything left unattached to a foundation. It could take away DFG, her incompetence, and the pain in her stupid, useless hands and her soft, out-of-shape body and weak legs, and leave behind nothing. Resolve, in this case, would be preferable, but it was easier to live with nothing than with something that hurt. God, she sounded as stupid as the grating retro emo music Kiara occasionally favored. The memory of riding to the Gladiator arena while that angst-soaked screamo abused her ears brought a lump into her chest, too low to cry over and too small to be noticed by anyone around her when her eyes went glassy.

The socks had faded from dull grey-white to a blotchy red, and adhered scabbily to her palms.

And then, she heard it. A low thrum beat at the horizon, both a muted whine and a steady thump merging into a familiar sound of a…

"Whoa, Matsushita-38H!" Kax, had he been a rabbit, would have adopted a rigid stance, ears pricked skyward towards the noise. "Am I right? Most popular Japanese cargo helicopter a few decades back?"

Cylon rotated one of his wrist joints experimentally, dislodging a miniscule tidbit of debris. "Correct."

Anzl's expression held a much more noticeable degree of impressed incredulousness. "Damn," he whistled. "You can tell all the way from here?"

With almost apologetic grin, the younger boy replied, "Yeah, but it's only for that project I had to do on early 21st century warfare. All the other people in my class used our textbook and researched the United Republic forces, but I went East and did Japan. And in recognition of my daring and brilliance, the teacher gave me an extra five points."

"Then she got fired." Tera put in.

Alisa nodded understandingly. "Well, duh. She should have been; it's not fair at all to the other students."

The youngest of the Ankiel family snorted and adjusted the gritty fabric of his T-shirt where it had ridden up the back of his jeans. "Just because I did _so _much more work, I naturally didn't deserve it at all."

"Yes, but the assignment never included researching 60-year-old helicopters," said Tera.

"Silence thy complaints and rebuttals, O Sister of Mine. Thou art merely jealous of my stunning intellectual prowess."

"Stunning whatever, my face." She knew it was stupid, but reacted too slowly to stop herself.

"Your mom." Kax sneered melodramatically.

Tera, whose weary brain had actually begun to take the argument seriously, cracked a smile, tension defused. It returned when she caught Alisa's eye-roll in the edge of her vision, and immediately found herself preoccupied with fighting off the nagging prod of embarrassment. Hoping to forge another distraction, she commented stiltedly, "It really stinks, huh?"

Nobody answered, because at that precise moment, a labored groan of metal wafted up from the stifling darkness at the base of the cliff. Tera was reminded of the sound Nine had elicited from Kiara's poor convertible when he converted it into a makeshift turret base; she paled when she realized why.

"Who's moving the cars?" Eric demanded of the robots in his 'authoritative executive' voice that his children had heard him use on various Take Your Kid to Work days. "Are there any more of you?"

"No." Cylon rumbled, and looked to Canti, whose headlamp flickered on once more, albeit with less intensity than before. "Nothing is registering on bio-scanners either."

With a small grunt, Shawn un-leaned himself from the boulder he had been reclining against and strode forward, dropping into a crouch in order to look down. His eyes narrowed. "The undead wouldn't show up on those, would they?"

Canti's light faded to red, then out of the visible spectrum again. Not a second passed before it snapped back to white and he sprang upright with more grace than could be expected of such a blocky figure, gesturing madly towards the higher reaches of the mountain.

"Run," said Nine. "We must climb higher."

"Mimigas?" Tera whispered, the word spoken from somewhere so low in her that she felt the vibrations of the utterance more than heard it leave her lips.

Somehow, Cylon heard her. "Three," he said simply.

"What?" Eric inquired cluelessly, leaning over her shoulder.

In the brief moments between his question and her answer, Tera felt tired. Not sleepy, not worn-down, just sick. She never really had considered what it was like for those stupid heroines who went on adventures like this in crappy movies and worse books, but even though she suddenly had a massive amount of sympathy for their plight, she could not bring herself to break down. Certainly, sitting in a corner sobbing 'I want to go home' over and over might be dramatic, but right now, it would accomplish nothing. Ok. She'd be tough. Alisa the Part-Time Ditz was being stoic enough. "Remember those undead rabbit bear things I told Kax about, Dad?" she said roughly, not quite able to keep the sadistically gleeful edge out of her tone. "The Mimigas? Yeah, those. I wasn't lying." She shoved him slightly, for good measure, as she made for the cliff, ripping away the socks from her hands.

The defiance of the moment was pathetically novel to her, but she had over-extended herself. How long could the wall stand?

"Hey!" Eric said belatedly. "You can't climb like that! Let one of the big PHADs carry you again, or…"

"Shut _up_!" she screamed, half at herself, and immediately regretted it when she back to see the impassive whiteness of his face in the gloom. He did have a point.

Her shirt and jeans were now stained beyond repair, as the blood from her hands managed to migrate down her arms faster than it had ever bled before. She grimaced; breaking the scabs like that had been stupid. A streak below her right eye, smear down her cheek, attempting to shake it off yielded only a spray of misty red droplets that didn't stop.

She put her hand back to the mountain, and the tiny red particles of something darker than light continued to swarm around the plateau; the same particles which had heralded the arrival of the Mimigas back in the Arena basement. Pushing herself away from the rocky surface, she ducked out of the cloud as it solidified. With her feet scrabbling for purchase, she scuttled away as Alisa shrieked and a fourth Mimiga materialized where she had stood before. What would have happened if she hadn't moved? Ok, skip that thought.

"What the hell is that?" said somebody, followed closely by "Get of the way so they can shoot it!" Tera couldn't tell if it was Anzl, Shawn, or her dad over the sound of the beast's enraged roar, which was cut short in a burst of automatic weapons fire, courtesy of Cylon.

Why did monsters always roar, she pondered existentially as the stink of its decaying self washed over her. Here they went again. Morbidly, she wondered whose way she would get in this time. Would it be Shawn? Perhaps her father.

She felt guilty imagining it. She loved him, of course. He was her daddy, who cracked lame jokes and rambled about nerdy things and fixed the computer when Kax's lofty explanations of how he had screwed it up (_upgraded_, he would protest, _upgraded!_) made no sense. And now they would probably all die. Joy.

The gradually mounting rhythm of the helicopter roared to a crescendo far overhead, and the Matsushita-38H began to descend to a second plateau. A real destination this time. Not Nine's stupid deferring. The robot in question continued to wave everyone upwards. Tera squeaked when Canti caught her about the middle and slung her onto his back _on top_ of the cryobox containing Chris. "How much? Isn't this too heavy?" Her frantically shouted questions were drowned out by the sound of the helicopter.

He climbed blazingly fast, bulky limbs working at a speed which belied their awkward shape and girth. She began to slip, and locked her elbows around his skinny neck, injured hands spitting fire and blood with each minute jolt.

Already, a Mimiga had crested the lower plateau. Looking down uncomfortably, and leaning back as much as possible without relinquishing her hold, Tera took in Cylon strapping the corpse-boy-robot-thing to his back and making a mad dash for the cliff. "Bingo," she whispered when Nine's transforming arm slugged the audacious beast with a bone-crunching uppercut that sent it reeling backwards into its partner. Both vanished over the lip of the precipice in a shower of rocks and frustrated howls. Why was the Soldiers' leader staying behind?

Then she noticed the still-prone, dimly-gleaming white chassis of Boss crumpled in the dirt. He was waiting for her to wake up. Wasn't there a way for him to reboot her? Tera guessed not, and then realized that with the crabby malfunctioning Soldier out of commission, Nemo had nobody to carry _him_ up the mountain. Though it was a horrible thing to think, the little Personal Household Assistant Droid could be replaced with little fanfare thanks to Eric's job as a chief roboticist. Somehow, she could not summon any guilt over this notion, and gave up trying after the latest jolt from Canti's climbing efforts.

"Does he need any help?" That was Anzl. Good old lanky-armed Anzl of the two-toned hair and over-abundant piercings. "'Lisa, what's that look?"

"That's a 'shut up and let's get to the helicopter' look! If the robot breaks, somebody can buy a new one! I can't buy a new you!" Only Alisa's desperately crazed screaming prevented the line from being atrociously sappy, Tera noted detachedly as her sort-of-friend continued even more loudly, "Just climb, people! Shut up and climb."

An even angrier Mimiga roar ripped Tera's eyes from Anzl's half-panicked girlfriend back to the fray below. All three assaulted Nine now, but in the interim he had managed to affix Boss to his back. With a concluding vengeful hook punch from his elongated arm—Tera thought its shape vaguely familiar somehow—the authoritative robot sprang for the cliff. He climbed three-legged, bounding upwards with huge thrusts of his legs and blindly clutching at any grip with his available hand.

He was approximately thirty feet from the ground when Tera recognized the massive gun his limb had reconfigured itself into, and smiled.

A second later the railgun bucked against its owner and the gleaming beam of spiraling blue light sliced wide, ripping open one of the beasts, which had no chance even to splatter before its cauterized halves cascaded in light thumps down the mountain. The other monsters crested the first plateau and lunged towards the second stretch of cliff and Nine. The Soldier's shot had been poorly calibrated due to his unfortunate position. He prepared a second shot.

_"I have sufficient battery supply to fire three rail gun shots, after which my weapon systems will go offline to conserve power…"_

Once more, Nine raised his arm and took aim at the charging Mimigas. Tera held her breath as the whirring helicopter beckoned the humans and their robotic escorts upwards like an inexorable siren song.

A warm, deceptively gentle sound as the cannon fired for the last time, and the entire mountain shook. The robot had fired low, across the plateau instead of aiming for the monsters. For a brief moment of mindless terror Tera was convinced they were all going to escape death-by-Mimiga and instead face death-by-landslide, which would be a fine end to the story now, wouldn't it?

The entire side of the cliff occupied by the Mimigas slid away gracefully, and if Tera strained she imagined she heard the disgruntled smash of the two hapless vehicles abandoned below. A fantastic cover-up on the part of Nine. Actually, Kiara would probably need an even more fantastic excuse to tell her dad. At least she was somewhere else.

The land did not slide.

Reaching the second plateau was uneventful. It was much larger, and not, in fact, a plateau, as Tera found when she achingly rolled off Canti, laboriously straightened up against the vehement protestations of every muscle in her back, and looked about her. They were really, properly in the low edges of the mountains now, though it was too dark to see much more than jagged black silhouettes against a jagged indigo sky mottled with indistinct blotchy clouds. With the scent of barbecued alien zombie monster content to lay low, everyone was privy to the erratic-but-gentle night breeze.

Said night breeze became more insistent as the chopping beat of the Matsushita rapidly gained intensity. Just on cue, as everyone below turned their eyes up, a pair of spotlights decided to do a Canti impression and blinded the onlookers with twin glaring beams of illumination, completely blotting out any clear view of what the flying machine looked like. "Hey!" called a distorted masculine voice, amplified by a megaphone. "Can somebody move that rock over there? Thanks!"

Before the 'thanks' was even fully uttered, Canti clumped over and deftly sent the sizeable boulder careering off the nearest precipice, before once again moving out of the way.

_I get it_, Tera thought, proud of herself for coming to a conclusion. _The robots can communicate with data, like telepathy, but the helicopter can't. It's old, though, if what Kax was saying is anything to go by. _She was half-hoping for a fancy sci-fi ornithopter like the experimental winged drones used by the army, but had not expected such a jarring clash of dated technology.

"Okay, everybody move to the perimeter. Nine-00, can you make sure nobody gets beheaded?"

Nine, still with Boss strapped to his back, herded everyone to the side as the spotlights scanned the landing area and the helicopter began its descent. It bore thick cowling in the front and back, and a heavy fin-like nub protruded from its forward underside in place of landing skids. It had no tail boom, instead sporting two massive rotors, the larger directly over the pilot's cabin and the smaller on the rear of the vehicle. As it neared the ground, the humans brought arms or hands over their faces to shield from the whipping dust. Tera made out the fact that it did have skids, but only in the back.

Its landing was dainty for such a behemoth. The motor wound down its intensity, dropping to a lower hum along with the thumping of the blades. As soon as it was stabile, the pilot shouted again, "I'm opening the doors. Everyone get in and find a seat, and buckle up. We need to move out as soon as possible, so grab everything you need and come on."

A wide cargo door slid open with a rumble, and Tera was surprised at how orderly the rush to get in was. Hanging back behind Anzl and Alisa, she caught a glimpse of Shawn's face, and stopped. He wore an expression of piercing suspicion towards the invisible pilot in the tinted cabin. Consumed with staring at the Matsushita, Kax ran into his sister's back, snapping her out of her trance.

Now suspicious as well, Tera filed onboard.

The pilot sighed through the loudspeaker. "Look, nobody is allowed to stay behind, get in." And Tera looked out in shock to see that Shawn remained outside.

The young man's face suddenly morphed into a grin. "Long time no see, Krieger," he shouted.

There came a burst of static as the pilot dropped the intercom, and then a lot of indignant spluttering. "It's _Kruger_," blurted the voice hastily, as though its owner wanted to say something else and couldn't think of anything. "I don't have time for this. Get in." But there was an underlying note of joy in the tone.

Shawn, still smiling, obliged, and the doors rumbled shut. Anzl asked, "You know him?"

Laughing, the ex-Gladiator leaned back. "You can still hear us, right?"

"Sure I can. Hold on a second." A panel between the passenger section and the pilot's cabin shifted, allowing a view into the cockpit. Tera's stomach lurched at the helicopter's beating whine rose in frequency and it began its ascent. "Everyone is tied down, right?"

A chorus of affirmatives and a few seatbelt clicks.

"Good," the pilot said, and peered behind through the new opening. His face, ensconced by a pilot's mask, glowed eerily in the red lights. "Hi there. Nine-00, what happened to Six-14?" As soon as he asked this, he turned back to a small screen where Tera could make out lines of text forming. "Oh. Well, I guess we can do some more home robot repairs." Eric and Callix Ankiel perked up at that, but neither said anything.

A curious beeping interrupted the conversation. "Hold on," said the pilot, tapping a few switches. "I've got a call. Don't say anything, please."

"Have you got them yet?" said a clearly female voice on the other line.

"Yep, safe and sound except for a busted Six-14, a broken robot that Six-02 couldn't scan properly, some nasty-looking hands, and a limp, none of which affect me. How are you?"

"We're all fine here. I just got off work, so I'm going to go pick up Peyton. Be careful, all right?"

The pilot's voice was warmer than before. "I'm always careful. Usually." A beat, and then it became uncomfortable. "And, uh, tell Peyton I love him, okay?"

"You can tell him." It was said mildly.

Any warmth whatsoever was usurped by awkwardness as the pilot blatantly changed the subject. "Huh. You won't believe who I found. Remember, uh, Nail?"

There was a moment of silence, before the woman said flatly, "You're kidding."

"Nope. Look, there's something on radar, I have to go. Take care. See you soon." And he flipped another switch, took a deep breath, and turned full attention back to the controls.

"What do you mean by 'something on radar'?" queried Laura.

He hesitated before calling back, "I'm not sure. Just sit tight. Wait a moment, there's a third. No, now they're falling off. Two…one…okay, just a glitch. False alarm." With a final switch-flick that must have activated some automatic control mechanism, the pilot stretched languorously, slipped expertly through the small door space, and emerged into the passenger section, standing just under six feet in the bulky, dated flight-suit. "Well now. Your names."

Eric scooted over to place an arm each around Tera and Laura, gesturing with a nod of his head towards Kax, who seemed to be dissecting the piloting mask with his eyes. "We're the Ankiels. I'm Eric, this is my partner Laura, and our kids, Tera and Callix."

"Call me Kax," said the boy offhandedly, in a tone that suggested he was trying to show off for the benefit of the pilot. The man nodded as the others finished their introductions, traded a few stilted pleasantries interspersed with nervous little laughs, and excused himself with a few meaningful glances toward the cockpit.

"Or call me unimpressed," Kax supplemented in a whisper to his sibling. "That works too. Definitely notmilitary."

"Ugh, you're so gay; he's preoccupied with flying the helicopter. You know, the one that's kind of _saving out lives_ right now?" Her sleep-harsh voice cracked a little as she tried to raise it at the end, yielding an embarrassing mini-yodel. Kax shrugged in response, all of his body sagging with his shoulders once they fell.

There was a great deal of silence, during which nobody did much of anything. In the interim, the pilot again extricated himself from the cockpit—Tera wished she could think of another word for it (cab? Driving-area-thing?)—but her brain was all dead and she wanted to sleep and the helicopter was loud and she didn't get how her mother was managing the whole slumbering dealie against her father's shoulder. Irritated, the girl slid away from both of them and lazily watched the pilot move about the vehicle.

Said individual hovered in front of Shawn for a few indecisive seconds before jarring the black-haired man from his doze with a light-but-friendly clap on the shoulder, almost hesitant. "How you doing, man?"

Shawn remained seated, knees apart with elbows propped on them as he leaned over. He half-smiled. "Pretty good. Pretty good."

The pilot took a swinging step back, hand falling from the ex-Gladiator's shoulder, yielding no reaction. "You die any more?"

"Not since last year." Shawn continued to stay straight ahead.

"I'm surprised they let you back on the rosters after that. Or what were you called this year?"

"Rigel. I liked Nail better, but hey."

Kax, suddenly flicked his gaze up. "Nail?"

Shawn's expression finally took off its metaphorical burqa and revealed itself as 'strained'. The pilot intervened animatedly, his whole body moving like he was conducting his words to an orchestra (or, as Tera's sleepy brain supplemented, selling a Sham-Wow Neo Plus; those commercials were just bizarre). "We have plenty of talking to do once we're home; Sue's going to be ecstatic to meet you all. Everyone just keep to yourself for now and try to get a little sleep. I'm really sorry for all the destination delays on the way here; you seriously wouldn't _believe_ how many roadblocks were set up for you guys."

"I didn't see anything," Tera wondered out loud as Kax cast poorly-veiled glances loaded with _something_ at her.

The young man laughed delightedly, a strange sound in the helmet, and clapped his gloved hands together. "Good. That's what we wanted you to see. Oh, Force Nine?" Nine snapped bolt upright with a salute, as did Canti and Cylon. "You did excellent work."

"Thank you," the robots' leader grated.

With that exchange, the pilot began making his way back to the cockpit, but stopped halfway through the hatch when Shawn called, "It's good to see you again, Herr Kruger." There was a hint of amusement in the title.

The helicopter's master paused, then nodded and slid back into his seat. "You too, Fuyahiko-chan," he called in a sing-song as he adjusted something complicated next to what might have been the throttle.

The panel slid shut, and the Matsushita-38H beat on into the night.

Several kilometers away, two police-force helicopters began their final approach to a particular now-nonexistent plateau, and appeared on a certain extended-range radar. Shortly after, their own detection equipment picked up an object moving on a direct course towards them.

"Robinson, did you say something just now?"

"No sir," answered the pilot of the second craft, a bulky vessel with ample room for apprehended prisoners. "What did you hear me say, sir?"

"Sounded kinda like 'Huzzah'," admitted his officer in the attack chopper.

Several kilometers away, the operator of a certain extended-range radar mounted in an aged Matsushita cargo helicopter frowned as a _third_ blip appeared, sighed in exasperation when all three blobs faded from the display, and chalked it up to a glitch.

* * *

**Word Count: 7148 **

Longest chapter yet as our dear pilot Kruger inadvertently drops a pair of plot bombs in our laps. Also the chapter I've had planned from the very beginning, which marks the halfway point in this story.

Thanks for reading so far. I'll make no promises on the timeliness of the next update, but I promise it _will _come. Until next time.


	10. Children of the Unsung War

Insert pathetic excuse here! Insert empty promises of sooner updates here! Insert self-centered bitching about my horrible, emotionally trying middle-class life, my relationship status, this week's sexual preference, my fragile mental health, and the rain on the plain in Spain here! Insert witty self-deprecating commentary about pathetic excuses, empty promises, and self-centered bitching here! Insert even wittier commentary about self-deprecating commentary about...

Have a recap, since if you're still reading this bloated monstrosity you're bloody fantastic and deserve not only a recap but a big shiny medal with "FUSIONMIX IS AN ASSHAT" written on it in luminescent mauve font. You also get the biggest chapter yet (this seems to have become a trend).

I did make a few changes to the end of chapter 9 that are somewhat important. The end of this chapter has also been altered for believability per **Cedric Bale's **prescient observations. Thanks, man. That's why I shouldn't write at 3 in the morning. :)

* * *

**_PREVIOUSLY ON "A SECOND CHANCE FOR REDEMPTION"..._**

After escaping from the Arena and being shuttled among various dingy, unkempt hotels by a rattletrap troupe of indigo Soldier robots (whose names and Force numbers you can review in the authors' note at the beginning of the last chapter), our 17-year-old heroine-slash-narrator Tera Ankiel and the rest of her tired family and friends have finally succeeded in a backbreaking climb of a cliff in the dark to reach a plateau from which a helicopter sent by unknown benefactors in charge of the robots can rescue them. During the climb, Tera encountered a broken, disturbingly humanoid robot when she almost fell off the cliff face thanks to the hand injuries she sustained trying not to be killed by monsters in the Arena basement. Thankfully, the Gladiator Shawn managed to be just in the right place at the right time to prevent her seriously injuring anything but the last vestiges of her pride.

Now that everyone is safe onboard the helicopter following a last-minute struggle with decomposing, reanimated 'mimiga' creatures, they all have a great number of questions. Unfortunately, the Soldiers are not too keen on answering, and everyone is too tired to digest information anyway after three days of minimal nutrition, no showers, and very small quantities of sleep. The pilot, who avoided formally introducing himself, told everybody that much talking can be done upon arriving at wherever they are going and meeting somebody whom said pilot refers to as 'Sue'.

There was another name-related plot bomb as well, but don't bother hunting for it. All will be made clear...and what won't be will be dug up so that at least you remember what it was.

* * *

_A Second Chance for Redemption_

by Fusionmix

_Chapter 10: Children of the Old War_

†††

_I'm not your boy_

_I'm not yours  
_

_I don't think I've ever been_

Tera had hoped she would fall asleep sometime during the ride; alas, she did not. By this point, sound had become a monotonous slurry of thumping grey sensation dripping stickily down her ear canals into the morose recesses of her brain. She also really had to pee. Maybe that was keeping her up, but on the other hand, she had never ridden in a helicopter before, so staying awake would likely yield fun and adventures.

Actually, considering the sort of 'adventures' she'd been having lately, staying awake was not making a very good case for itself. She'd much prefer a gratuitously long hot shower and a bed that didn't smell like marijuana to more zombified albino Wookiees and broken robots and almost dying. But if she went to sleep now, there was the chance she would dream about waterfalls, ocean tides, and trickling bodies of water in motion until she pissed herself for the first time since she was...seven? Eight?

_Why yes_, she glumly thought, dully thumping her face against one fist a few times. It made a papery sound, and the twinge along the skin of her jaw hinted at what was probably a germinating crop of zits to end all zits. _Yes,_ she repeated to herself, _when _I _ride cool old Japanese helicopters, I always make sure to contemplate the local acne situation and remember the last time I peed in my pants. _She nearly giggled. Instead, she made a scratchy sound at the back of her throat, which became a muffled, single cough.

"Plaaaague," mumbled Kax in a sleepy nasal baritone that was more a rumble than an actual word. The great Callix Ankiel, unable to fully form a jibe for lack of mental energy?

Tera caught herself picking on one of the opaque yellowy-white plastic covers obscuring the round little window behind her, recognized the hypocrisy in thinking of her brother that way, and flopped forward to place her face onto her knees, nose between them. The stretch hurt her back; she sat up again and looked around.

Shawn still held his 'Thinker' pose. She wasn't sure if he was asleep or merely brooding in that way that is mysterious and sexy when men in movies do it, and incredibly creepy and not- sexy when actual ones do. Alisa had flopped over on Anzl's shoulder and fallen asleep, stringy brown locks sprawled across her makeshift pillow's narrow chest. Yeah, 'not dating'. Of course not. Tera looked away.

She let her drifting eyes pass over the Soldiers and the cryobox with Chris in it and the mangled pale-skinned robot boy. Still in his seat, Kruger the pilot...at least, she figured that was his name from what Shawn had called him, though from their interaction on the plateau it may well have been Krieger. Anyway, Germanic Name Guy looked to be nodding off. Was that a good thing in a moving airborne vehicle? Oh, there he went turning a page, he was reading a paperback. A real paperback. Tera found herself intrigued. How old was he? The guy was tall but skinny, and moved and talked in a jerky, over-exaggerated, hard-to-describe odd way, some intangibly noticeable characteristic of which almost made her wonder if he was gay.

But then he _had _talked to that woman earlier. The Peyton he mentioned could be his son, but could also very well be a boyfriend.

_Correction: The local acne situation, my bladder, and the sexual preference of the guy saving our lives right now. Way to be grateful! _Forgetting about her previous attempt, Tera flopped her face onto her knees once more, again recoiling at the burn in her spine. Blah, she was out of shape. Sitting up, she prodded her soft belly and scowled. Not as though she was super fat or anything, just kind of not-skinny. Or something.

_Correction #2: Zits, pee, ambiguously gay pilot, my current state of physical fitness or utter lack thereof..._

The Matsushita-38H lurched, and everyone lurched with it; with exception of the artificial occupants of the bay they all jerked upright into an array of spastic limbs in possession of disoriented humans who have forgotten where they fell asleep. "Crap," barked Anzl, voice off-key as he thrust his head above the surface of whatever dream-state he had fallen into and took a gasping breath of wakefulness. "Did someone find us?"

The bass keening of the rotors dropped in pitch alarmingly. A few others added to Anzl's commentary.

"Oops," came the pilot's voice. "Uh, sorry, I didn't want to wake you guys up; you all looked so tired. We're just starting to land. Guess I should have mentioned that. If I had a fasten-seatbelts light I'd turn it on, but I don't. I haven't crashed yet, so we all should be just fine."

Alisa hissed, "How comforting."

Kax tutted in a mock severe manner directed at the pilot's lack of professionalism and said something that would probably have been witty had not the radio suddenly spat out the same woman's voice from earlier, this time much too loud and with what sounded like a dog barking in the background. "Matsushita, you are cleared to land."

"Why are you playing air-traffic controller?" The pilot griped. "I know how to land. I'm better at it than you."

"Good for you. This time you have multiple passengers and four of the robots _and _whatever broken one you found _and _a corpse in a box. You're carrying a lot more weight."

"Eh," the pilot waved a hand flippantly. "If this thing can carry a whole team of scientists and their science people gear crammed wall-to-wall, it can carry us."

Tera missed most of that, as currently the phrase 'corpse in a box' had taken up residence between her ears. How could Chris be _dead_? But nobody had bothered to check the cryobox until now – maybe whatever infection from the mimigas had gotten to him already? She shivered. That made two. Chris had been nice. She'd tried to kill him with a cinderblock when they'd first met, sure, but he'd been _nice _once they got that confusion cleared up. He'd fought down in that basement, and tripped over her fat ass, and now whatever poisonous slime on that monster's claws that mangled his arm had...how had it killed him so fast? That's why he was in the cryobox, to _stop_ the infection. But Komodo lizards could kill in minutes with their saliva. Dead, frenzied things that bled red light probably could do worse.

The thoughts of Chris were limited to just that: thoughts. Feeling anything about them took too much energy she didn't have.

She wished the windows were transparent so she could see out. The only light from outside was the ebbing, lancing beam from what was probably the helipad flashing intermittently through the cockpit glass.

Tera could feel the helicopter circling, canted slightly to the left, but the movement no longer held much mystery. She wanted out; to just go die in some corner somewhere that nice, not-evil Gladiators didn't. Her melodramatic thoughts were interrupted as the rotors jerked the Matsushita again. A sensation of vertigo slugged its gooey fist into the blonde's stomach amidst an increasing whine. "Here we go," said the pilot with a note of generic confidence. With the blades snarling into breathy, battering crescendo, the chopper leveled out.

An innocuous bump; the rotors continued to scream, but the helicopter remained stolidly where it had come to rest. The pilot's hands flitted across the controls, shoved the joystick away, and popped the doors. An influx of gusty updraft from the quickly decelerating rotors swept dust, crinkled leaves, and chilly reality into the bay. Outside it smelled of earth and grit. "Safe," the woman on the radio cried, as though calling in a victorious baseball player. "That was great. I also remembered to move the trash cans this time, so they didn't spill crap all over the place. Come on in and then we can stop telling BS to all these people and get them settled. There's tea and decaf."

Everyone struggled out of the restraints and tottered towards the open ramp, led by an imperious Nine-00 bearing Chris' innocuous white coffin, while Tera's dad Eric leaned into the cockpit to proffer a handshake to their savior. "Thank you so much," he said firmly.

"You're welcome," came the return, equally strong. Eric's daughter reconsidered her estimates of the young man before the lure of free air became too great. Following her father outside, she helped herself to a deep breath and a look around her surroundings. The helipad was a simple concrete affair circumscribed by floodlights which, upon her looking at them, vengefully made a splotchy mess of her already limited night vision. She still managed to make out sharp-edged vertical lumps recognizable as buildings, whose uniformity reminded her of motels or apartments. Collecting herself, she hurried after the robot leader Nine. The big Soldier robot in question made a beeline for a large single-story complex with lighted windows and, thank God, what would probably be very clean bathrooms with showers in them.

As the motley crew alternately huddled sleepily or stood rigidly 'at ease' on the long porch before the door, the pilot slid up in front and knocked. "Might take a minute." He signed, yanked off his flight headgear, and swiped a bulky sleeve over his face from chin to forehead. Tera made out a sticky halo of sweaty, tamped-down hair and a beaky profile before the pilot was silhouetted violently in the suddenly-opened square of inviting yellow light.

In the door stood a woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a comfortable blouse, a skirt that somehow reminded Tera of hippies, and the longest snake the girl had ever seen looped around her neck like the world's most unattractive and un-feathery feather boa. Anzl and Tera's mother Laura, who did not approve of snakes, stepped back hastily, and for a few seconds a minor state of confusion reigned as people bumped into each other and trod on feet. Tera did not particularly like reptiles in general, but avoided adding to the situation.

"Dude," said the pilot after a few seconds of situation-appropriate staring. "Why are you wearing the snake?"

The woman sighed, and Tera instantly recognized her as the 'flight controller' from earlier. "I am carrying Kiki because the dog is disturbing her."

"Is _that _what was on the com? Where did we get a dog from? We don't _have _a dog?"

Something small, fuzzy, and white bolted out the door between the young woman's knees, barked twice in between dodging Germanic Name Guy's boots, and proceeded to jump all over Shawn. "He showed up just after you left," the snake lady explained, shifting one of Kiki's dull-gleaming coils to allow for the crossing of arms. "Sue said to feed him, so I gave him some of the cat food, and he ate it. He's house-trained, also."

Shawn had already scooped up the little dog and was scratching him roughly behind the ears, grinning widely. The pilot watched pensively. "Is that Mickie?"

"Mick," corrected Shawn. Said canine snuffled and, done with being adored, demanded down with a series of petulant sneezes.

Alisa asked the question Tera couldn't quite find words for: "Ok, we almost ran that dog over twice, and then it was in the car with us when we escaped, then it got lost and appeared back in the car, then it vanished and is here after it walked like two hundred miles across Arizona. What."

Shawn continued to watch his dog as Mick trotted around the dark patio, venturing into the pools of shadow only to sniff something, and then darting back as though affixed to the group by a loose rubber band. "Mick is a _special _doggie." He looked up.

"There is way too much 'specialness' right now," Kax grumbled.

The snake-lady laughed. "Not disagreeing with you. We can explain everything later. I'm Cassandra Adrian and this is Kiyohime, your friendly neighborhood reticulated python. She won't bite you. I'll go put her back in the tank; she doesn't care for the dog. Mick, was it? Come in!"

Cassandra removed herself from the doorway to allow the group entrance. Tera, jammed in the sleepy mini-stampede, was the last human to enter. She was greeted by a comfortably large room eerily reminiscent of a hotel lobby...well, that confirmed her observations on the helipad. With their more articulate host vanishing up a flight of steps, lengthy reptile in tow, Tera looked to the pilot for some explanation of what to do or where to go, and paused when she caught him turning the same bewildered stare towards retreating Cassandra.

The woman stopped as if reconsidering something. "Actually, here." Turning neatly, she trotted down the stairs, deftly unwound the stiff reptile from her shoulders and handed it to the young man in question, who barked out a muted exclamation of surprise. "You put the snake away."

"Sure," he half chirped, half grunted in that odd ascending-tone way of his. It was unfair to think so, but Tera found it an unpleasant voice to listen to, crooked and wobbly like Kax sounded when he became excited and the late onset of puberty betrayed him. The pilot's face was built oddly as well, now that he was facing towards her she could make out the contrast, of sharp chin and eyes deeply sunk in an angular, fine-boned skull, to the snub, childishly turned-up nose and soft upper lip protruding in a permanent half-smirk. The best word to spring to mind was 'severe', except that it carried connotations of dangerous attractiveness, a commodity of which he had absolutely none. His visage, akin to his voice, was—unfairly, Tera thought she should add, though that didn't stop it from being so—unlikeable. The word 'severe' could not suffice when 'pinched' volunteered itself for the role. Those jutting cheekbones could wound.

Nameless Pilot's eyes flicked from the snake languidly swathing itself around his middle and shoulders to her, and he scowled, mouth contorting effeminately. Tera experienced a sudden urge to kick him in his bitchy woman-face, except that she'd feel guilty afterwards and probably couldn't get her foot that high off the ground anyway. _It's the lack of sleep talking_, she reassured herself. Seldom otherwise was she afflicted with sudden bouts of longing to inflict violence. Except when Kax was involved—or, in retrospect, when scary British Gladiators tried to force open doors of one-way elevators.

Scary _dead _British Gladiators.

The group continued to stand about awkwardly as Cassandra walked briskly down the entry passage and around a corner, seemingly oblivious. The gentle thumping of her bare feet on the tiles stopped abruptly as she hit carpeting somewhere, and then there was no sound beyond weary breathing.

Eric Ankiel broke the uncomfortable silence with all the grace of a plate being dropped onto a tile floor, scattering its bits all over for people to step on. "You never told us your name."

The pilot froze in place. Kiyohime the snake did the opposite and nosed herself downward, wrapping languid coils around his left thigh. "Um!" He said loudly, then turned and fled upstairs with some difficulty and much clumping.

"Bye, Um!" Kax quietly called after him. Eric shrugged half-heartedly.

"What I don't get," Alisa opined unenthusiastically, "Is why they invited us in just to decorate the tile..."

Anzl put in, "Linoleum."

She did not even bother to look at him, instead choosing to lean back with a _thump _against the nearest vertical surface, which fortuitously happened to be a wall. "...the linoleum with our filthy, stinking selves. I have never stunk this bad in my life."

Nobody quipped. Silence leaked out of the walls, flopped across the pitted budget linoleum, and foreclosed with little ceremony on the conversation.

Tera took several deep breaths over the course of the next few moments. Each of them had been drawn with the intention of being used to express the idea that _maybe they were supposed to follow Cassandra_ before she gave up partway through the thinking process. She was about to start again when the young woman in question reappeared, placid as ever, tribal patterned skirt sashaying a dry-rustling melody around the precise movement of her feet. "Ok, there are hot beverages for everyone, we should have sleeping arrangements figured out for the time being, and I apologize for the last three days."

Tera inhaled again. "Uh, excuse me, could we maybe, I mean, could I, I don't know if anyone else wants to but I think I could maybe want to is it okay if I take a shower?"

Somewhere in North America, an English teacher broke down sobbing in the middle of reading _Heath Has Three Genetic Donors _out loud to a second-grade class for reasons he would never be able to explain, since 'Heath likes the number three.' is a perfectly functional sentence.

Cassandra studied the weary girl for a moment. Inscrutably quirking one eyebrow, she pressed her lips together, regarded Tera critically, and announced, "You're only a little taller than me, aren't you?"

"Buh?" Tera said. It sounded particularly intelligent.

"Change of clothes. You'll need one."

Illuminated by decent indoor lighting for the first time in hours, Tera glanced down at herself. Oh. Though the raw scrapes on her hands had scabbed over again, they had left their marks all up and down her jeans and top. As she raised her arms to about head level and stared uncomprehendingly at her own streaked elbows, the dried blood on her skin itched and pulled. Movie blood always managed to stay so morbid and bright, glistening until the end credits or caking over thick and red—this mess had simply run and dried, as though she had pooled brown wood stain in her palms and allowed it to spill over them down her arms.

She rubbed her less-battered right thumb jerkily over the dried mess on her other arm, and as the skin dimpled, a fine mist of bloody dust sprinkled (_like paprika! _she thought, _only nasty!_) towards the tile with a papery sound. That broke the spell. She ventured, in a small voice, "Ew?" Slightly more coherent.

With a grin, Kax rearranged his slouching self. "The slasher movie look really suits you."

His sister instinctively glanced at the old, much-faded brown smears on her jeans from the ladder-sliding-against-the-house incident all those years ago. They had been joined by a host of drips and muddied dirt bits, victim to both her injuries and the climb. Vaguely, she managed, "Changing clothes would probably be good. Also, do you have a bathroom?"

Cassandra smiled in that amused, patronizing way people do for children. "Yes, we have a number of bathrooms and showers, so there will be no deficit today, just some taking of turns."

Clumping footsteps from above heralded the return of the pilot, who leaned his arms on the banister and looked down at the bunched up little group. "The one up here definitely works, but I dunno if all the rooms do yet. I forgot to ask you which blocks we'd be putting them in." He studiously avoided eye contact with anyone.

"Ten and eleven," answered Cassandra. "We can figure the details out later. For now there are showers and warm drinks."

Tera, who was not interested in the talking or the warm drinks, did quite enjoy taking a shower. It was about twenty minutes long and involved three kinds of shampoo and two types of conditioner and a lot of very hot water. It was fantastic. She dutifully ignored the muddy blood-brown tinge of the water spiraling around her toes, down the drain.

Halfway through, somebody opened the bathroom door and came in. Tera started and froze when the intruder's graceless tread prompted a jagged squeal from the floor, but whoever it was left only seconds later, shutting the door behind them. As soon as she was finished, Tera tentatively stuck her head out from behind the curtain and peered around the room. The visitor had been the bearer of clothing, two sets of it. One consisted of an oversized t-shirt and baggy athletic shorts, the other of actual people-clothes she did not care about right now. Curiously, she inspected the tag of the t-shirt and found 'Markus Adrian' written on it in faded black Sharpie. Well then, Pilot Guy had a first name and tentative identity; probably Cassandra Adrian's brother. Or maybe partner, but their interactions didn't seem to suggest that at all. Still, it didn't explain what Shawn had called him back at the plateau. Maybe Markus was an ex-Gladiator as well. He wasn't as cut as Shawn or as bulky as Derek and Chris, but...ohgodChris.

Tera threw on the people-clothes in the space of a half-minute (she didn't really want to be wearing the surly pilot's clothing) and tried to run a comb through her hair, a comb which promptly jammed itself in the snarled masses of tangles she hadn't bothered to un-mat before showering. Cleanliness had energized her; she tossed the comb aside and yanked the door open, but then thought better of it and quickly picked the comb up from the floor to place it on the counter by the sink where she'd found it.

She hadn't bothered to take in the layout of the little building that one of the robots—she hadn't been able to tell which in the dark—had gestured her family towards. Thankfully it was small, with a tiny tiled entryway adjacent to the kitchen, which opened out across the bar into a modestly-sized living room with two doors that led to bedrooms. At least, the one she'd just left led to her bedroom. No time for architecture.

"Hey, Tera," said Kax, rising from the couch where he'd been doing a remarkable chameleon impression. "Are you done with the shower?"

She blinked owlishly at him, suddenly hearing another shower running in the background. Ok, so the other door did lead to another bedroom+bathroom combo. "I'm done. Who's in the other one?"

"Your father," interjected Laura, armed with a Pocketpad and obscured next to her son on the couch. "Alisa, Anzl, and Shawn are staying next-door."

Tera found this disappointing, and quickly chastised herself. No. Futile crushes on Gladiators _bad_. Collecting herself, she answered, "Uh, ok, thanks. Where's Cassandra?"

"Also next-door. Were you wanting to ask her something? She said it could wait until tomorrow. Are you all right?" Laura Ankiel broke out the minefield-stare, and locked eyes with her daughter. She was not the one who looked away.

"Oh, yeah, I'm fine," Tera reassured her, a little too loudly. "Just want to, you know, figure out what's going on and everything."

Kax's muffled voice drifted out of the back room. "That's what we're doing tomorrow. And hey, which of these toothbrushes is yours?"

There were toothbrushes? "Um," said Tera edifyingly, "Whichever. I haven't used one yet. Just pick."

"I call blue!" Kax called back triumphantly. "Huzzah for the perpetuation of groundless, socially-constructed gender bylaws!"

Bare feet chilled by the tile in front of the door, Tera sighed. "Just as long as the other one isn't some gross shade of barf," she muttered, and headed out onto the yellow-lit landing. Room 10 stood across from her with its door slightly open.

Pilot Guy—Markus? Kruger? Kriegerin?—nearly knocked her over as he abruptly stepped out. "Oh crap," he said, grabbing her arm to steady her and then releasing as if scalded. "Sorry." He deliberately avoided eye contact. Tera found it reassuring in a base, passive-aggressive fashion.

She considered staring deeply into _his _eyes to psyche him out, but found herself staring fixedly at Room 10's welcome mat instead. A pill bug trundled slowly out from under it, casting a great humping shadow in the light of the old tallow-gold lamp fixture. "Who's inside?" She finally managed, while he began trying to delicately edge away.

"Huh?" His child-like expression of surprise startled her with just how open and not-pinched it made his face look, but it faded quickly when he realized that yes, she was in fact talking to him. "Oh, just the other people. You can go in. They're just talking, I think." Slipping deftly around her without bumping the wall, he made for the stairs. Tera considered asking for his name, but he was halfway gone by the time he finished his answer, so she didn't.

Inside, she found the building to be an exact mirror opposite of Room 11, where she and her family were situated. The only difference she could distinguish was the stringent smell of ammonia. She took two steps into the room, and sneezed by way of greeting.

Shawn, seated on the couch, glanced up. "Oh, hello, Tera," he said loudly and off-handedly, like they'd been neighbors for years and she'd dropped by to borrow detergent or something. Ammonia-scented detergent.

"...tremors. She's certain that something is keeping him from..." said somebody else, drifting in from one of the back rooms. It was Cassandra, loaded down with an armful of sheets. She stopped speaking immediately upon sighting the blonde girl in the doorway. "Oh. Do you need something, sweetie? And if you could shut the door, please, or you'll let bugs in."

"Uh, hi. Ok," Tera began, eyes darting from Cassandra to Shawn and back again before settling on inspecting one of the four circular ceiling lights. "I just wanted to ask about Chris. The guy in the box?" After a few false starts she stepped quickly in the room and pressed the door closed behind her.

Setting down the sheets next to Shawn on the couch with a soft _thump_, Cassandra alighted on the arm of an easy chair and cocked her head expectantly, as if she wasn't sure what Tera was getting at. The girl tried again. "When we were in the helicopter, you were talking on the intercom...the radio thing...and said he was a corpse? Is he dead?"

Shawn barked out a short little laugh, and Cassandra's face softened immediately. "I'm sorry about saying that. Shawn had the same question, and the answer is no. I was being needlessly misleading in my attempt at wit; Chris is alive."

Unable to stop the stupid grin that spread out on her face, Tera did a little hop of victory and boxed a fist into the air. She hadn't totally gotten somebody killed through her stupid clumsiness! "Will he be okay? His arm got hit by, um, something, and..."

Cassandra held up one hand to forestall any attempts at cover-up. "I know about the mimigas, Tera. Chris is going to be fine, but he'll have to lose that hand. The bacteria count of a mimiga is completely off the charts, beyond lethal."

Tera winced. Which hand had been hit? Would it affect his daily life? Would he forever blame her for being the stupid fatty who got in his way and made him trip? He'd be totally right in doing so. It wasn't like she didn't have anything _better _to do; she could easily have just hidden in that Arena tunnel instead of bunching herself up right where people trying to fight off the monsters would _trip _over her. "Will he get a fake hand? He's a Gladiator, right, so they tend to, um, have those?" Every one of her sentences, question or not, seemed to end as one. If this went on, she'd soon appropriate the world's supply of question marks.

Her answer came from Shawn. "Cassandra tells me they don't have the technology here to develop a prosthetic like the ones a lot of us used. A hospital could do it, but..." He quirked one side of his mouth upward in a lazy half-smile, finishing the sentence without words.

"A bunch of Gladiator-phobes, huh?" Tera quipped stiltedly.

He chuckled, the skin at the corner of his eyes crinkling up a little. Man, that ceiling light sure was interesting! There was even a June bug in it! An _alive_ June bug! "Something like that. More like incarcerated-prisoner-phobes, actually. No healthcare for us." Without warning, his face became serious. Tera found it safe to look at him again. "You're lucky you met us and not some of the others."

"Yeah. Dad was talking about that."

Shawn cocked a narrow black eyebrow. "What, he give you a lecture?"

"On the terrible dangers of strangers, yes." A stupid grin wormed its way onto her features.

The Gladiator smiled in return, and bounced one palm off his knee for emphasis. "Of course. We're a perilous lot." He continued to move his hand, watching its motion as though it were some strange phenomenon out of his control. "I'm guessing you want to know what's going on."

That, Tera reflected, would be pretty much amazing. "Uh, sure. 'What's going on' as in plans for the future, or 'what's going on' as in, you died?"

With a short, huffed grunt accompanied by a squeak from the sofa, Shawn pushed himself to his feet. He hadn't showered yet. Tera held her breath for a second until the ammonia-stink took over again. Cassandra watched him rise and interjected, "I'm guessing the latter, right?"

He smiled again, this time a little ruefully. "Yeah. Want to give the backstory?"

"If you'd like me to add all the embellishments that Gillian did. I mean..." She paused hard, and flicked her eyes to Tera as though she had accidentally given something away. Tera caught a flicker of hesitation in her brown eyes. "Which backstory?"

"It's fine," Shawn said quickly. "Forget the backstory. I'll just do me." Cassandra nodded her approval and stood up; Shawn turned to face Tera in a loose military 'at ease' position and took a deep breath,. A series of muffled metallic rings outside heralded somebody's rapid advance up the stairs, and he let it out in a relieved gust.

Outside, the voice of Maybe-Markus the Pilot Guy fired off in a note of unreserved frustration. "No! I said _no_! Damn it, you're not even listening to me!" The door crashed open.

"Bitch!" bellowed a little boy, charging into the room and nearly taking a tumble as his feet slipped on tiles damp from cleaning solution. He turned to grip the door with both hands and swing it viciously shut; it slammed brutally into the pilot's half-raised protective hand and the wiry man jerked his upper body backwards, clutching bruised knuckles. _Wow_, Tera thought. _'Tis the season for injured fingers. Fa la la la la, la la la...ok, stop._

Markus quickly regained his stance, keeping a foot in the door to thwart efforts at shutting it. He spit hoarsely in pain as the boy simultaneously stomped on his toes and then slammed them in the door. Tera watched the tableau with growing horrified fascination as the man took hold of the knob to stop the door swinging everywhere; his arm shook slightly with the boy's efforts at wrenching control away. Robbed of his fun, the boy screamed instead in a voice too high and too keening to be normal, until Markus roughly shoulder-slammed the door and wrapped narrow, clawing hands around small flailing arms. "Stop it, you little turd!" Markus shouted again, and to Tera's immense discomfort, the boy burst into tears.

"Get off me! Get off get off _get off..._" He repeated it like an accelerating mantra of madness, and even his cricket voice rang cacophonously in the tiny room. Markus' turned his face upward, eyes wide and pleading. Tera wondered if the wildly thrashing child had some kind of mental disability, but her train of thought was interrupted when Cassandra finally intervened.

Tera had not been aware of just how much raw _presence _Cassandra commanded. She could not have been anything more than five-foot-five-inches, as she was a little shorted than the blonde girl, but she carried herself in a way that spoke absolute volumes. Not that she was particularly beautiful, either. The baggy shirt and hippy skirt disguised her figure, but she was not slender, and the first word that sprang to mind to describe her frame would be 'sturdy'. Tera guiltily felt a little bit better about her own poorly-conditioned self.

"Peyton," said Cassandra, firmly, and with a great deal of even volume, "Be quiet and stop screaming."

"Peyton," echoed Markus, voice shaky with the effort of what sounded like calming himself down. "Be good, okay?"

The boy, Peyton, stopped convulsing in Markus' grip. He went completely limp and drooled a sticky blob of spit onto the clean floor, giggling as he did. Markus dropped him with an exasperated shove, and he flopped into a small heap before realizing he was free and turning his small, round face sideways on the spit-slick tiles, exposing a full-lipped grin. That pouting mouth and pinched brow radiated malice unimaginably vulgar. "Eat a dick," he crowed to Markus. "I'm not listening to you."

Tera jumped in shock as Markus half-flung a staggering Peyton the few feet to Cassandra, where he curled into his best impression of a snail, cradling his pudgy arm to hide the white marks against pink skin that betrayed the strength of Markus' grip. Nobody spoke. Tera watched the marks fade as healthy color rushed their borders. There might be bruises tomorrow.

"_Stop_." That was the Cassandra-Voice of Death again. Tera found it chilling. She was five years old again and throwing rice on the floor as a sort of physics experiment. She was six and digging holes in her Mom's garden (who cared about those awful thorny rose-bushes anyway?) to bury dead moths she'd found on the windowsills. She was ten and giving her little brother a mullet with a pair of very dull safety shears. She was..._most definitely focusing on the situation at hand_.

The little boy slowly began to scramble into a standing position. Cassandra crouched before him. For a second, it looked like she would pick him up, but she just watched as he stood, and then did so as well. Her eyes, unreadable, turned on Markus. His face was stuck in a sort of expression that couldn't make up its mind on whether it was a gleeful smirk of vengeance or a badly-cracked death mask.

Tera, wishing she had been a good and sensible child and just gone to bed, slowly drifted into a peripheral position where the impending domestic apocalypse's blast radius would hopefully leave her unscathed. Markus trembled, and then he slumped against the wall beside the open door, forehead ground into the politically-correct cream-colored wallpaper, arms raised in a protective cage around his face. "Oh god, I'm sorry, I'll stop. I'll..." Markus turned quickly, one hand brushing stringy, sweat-clumped strands of hair out of his face and staring, face contorted fearfully, at Peyton. "Peyton? Hey, I'm sorry." Gone was the angry man who had wrestled a little boy. "Are you okay? Hey, kiddo?"

But Peyton was already affixed to Cassandra's legs, wrapping his arms around them like they were the trunk of a tree with his face buried in a handful of bunched-up skirt. He didn't even bother looking at the hoarse-voiced person kneeling a few feet away. "I don't want to go to bed right now. There's too much people here and the robots are fixing each other and I can't close my window so it's _too loud_." Cassandra sighed. Markus awkwardly clambered to his feet and dutifully did not make eye contact with the boy.

"Hey, Kruger?" Shawn said softly. "Tera had some questions about me. I was going to ask if it was all right with you to talk about it, since some of it involves you. Or would you rather wait until tomorrow?"

Markus roughly palmed at his eyes and the blunt, disdainfully pinched expression from earlier descended. He turned it on the girl in the corner, but continued to address Shawn like she wasn't there. "Talk about what? What did she ask you?"

"Uh," squeaked Tera, feeling the need to contribute. "Hi? I just asked about...well, I didn't ask, it was more that I wanted to know about the, uh, him not being dead."

"Then you don't need me. Leave my bits out, and Fuyahiko can talk all he wants. Cheers." And he left, stomping out the door like a disgruntled preteen.

Shawn stood and barked out suddenly, "Wait!"

Markus turned, door mostly shut behind him. "What."

"Storme is dead."

There was a short gap in conversation, which sounded like chewing, as thought a person has filled their mind with a thought and can't quite get their brain's badly-adhered dentures around its slippery coating. Markus said at length, "Did you do it?"

"No, they did. Merciful euthanasia." Shawn looked at the ground as he said it.

Markus beamed forcefully, "Too bad." Then the door shut, and he was gone.

Peyton chuckled, slowly, like he was hiccupping.

"I," said Cassandra as the dust settled, "am incredibly sorry you had to see that." Peyton laughed loudly again, a nasal loop of sound that played over, and over, and _over_ again like something was the funniest thing in the world. "Peyton, stop. We need to get you to bed. You can sleep in the purple room today, okay? Shawn, I left the sheets there; three stacks. See you tomorrow then?"

He nodded gravely as she half-dragged a drooling Peyton out by the hand. He turned to Tera as soon as the door shut, and they both stared blankly at each other for a few seconds before collectively exhaling. Sitting down on the far end of the couch, Shawn massaged his temples with two fingers of each hand. "Oh, _man_. I was hoping it would be better by now."

Encouraged by the fact that he was looking away, and by how large and open and innocuously inviting the couch appeared, Tera gingerly seated herself on the middle cushion. Her terrible, traitorous mind summoned a memory of her falling asleep on his shoulder in the car during the first leg of their flight from the Arena. Don't blush. _Don't _blush.

She blushed.

Well, poo.

But he didn't raise his head, so it was fine. "Kruger...he was a Gladiator," Shawn began. "He shouldn't have been there."

Tera recalled what she had learned from Chris about how poorly the men were treated. "Was he falsely accused? What was his crime?" Some part of her brain that was still functional and not sleep-deprivation-dulled reminded her that the other Gladiator had wanted his part of the story left out, but the other parts were locked in a loop of _Oh boy! Gossip! _and she didn't have any mental RAM left to feel guilty about it.

Shawn didn't fall for it. "Kruger will have to tell you that. It was either jail time or Gladiator time. We met last year after he'd been in the pits for five, maybe six. The Arenas used to have a special league for people like him, and sometimes they'd be matched against us for sake of novelty or whatever."

"Five or six years? How long were you a Gladiator? If, um, it's okay to ask." He definitely looked younger than the wiry Markus Kruger.

Shawn finally looked over and smiled a bit. "For a while. It got boring, and Kruger and I started talking about life on the outside and I decided to help him get out. He was starting to go mental, too." The smile fell away. Shawn's eyes were almost black in the dim overhead light. "We all were. So I decided to see what I could do."

He shifted, leaned towards her so he could explain himself with hand motions. "See, when a Gladiator gets wrecked or killed, they get dragged down the emergency elevator and rushed through the containment level to the labs. The elevator is set to make one trip."

Oh. _OH_. "So." Tera laughed shortly, "That's why there was a one-way elevator."

Shawn nodded eagerly. "That's why. You remember the big doors at the end of the tunnel? The Controllers drag the corpse back there to see what they can cobble together out of it. The thing was," and here he cracked his knuckles gleefully. Angsty revelation on the mountain be damned; that enthusiasm, all directed in conversation to _her_, still did handsprings in Tera's stomach. "The thing was, the corpse they dragged back there that night wasn't dead."

The little handsprings tripped and landed on their faces. This was it. "That was you," Tera said slowly. "That was you, right?"

He twitched, like he was about to leap to his feet and pump his fist in the air once, but settled for a jerky nod and a grinned, "Yeah."

"So, you faked your death? Or, uh, you weren't dead? I just said that, didn't I?" Great! All that year of tormenting herself over seeing a spur-of-the-moment crush dead for naught! Or something. Blah.

"Naw, I died. Been kind of a chronic illness of mind. I mean, I always get better, but it can be pretty disturbing to bystanders. Sorry you had to see that, anyway. I hadn't quite meant to have my ass handed to me so thoroughly."

Tera nodded dumbly.

He mimed pushing some kind of trolley. "The techs rush me down the elevator, toss me into that little room, and a few hours later I wake up and start kicking ass. I'd been in touch with Kruger's contact for a while—I didn't have a name then, but it was Cassandra—and some of the Soldiers pulled a less dramatic version of that rescue they did for us. Kruger got out, and that was fine. There were some other guys I wanted to get out too, so I stuck around."

"You stayed? It was terrible down there!"

"Eh, I don't care. They were all pretty leery of me, so it wasn't that bad. This attempt at getting me and the others out didn't work out so well. Hadn't expected the undead Mimiga invasion."

She recalled the final moments of Shawn's fight against Gilgamesh, and suddenly said, "Were you trying to die again, when you fought Gilgamesh? Why did you use a plasma grenade?"

His expression was almost feral. Lips pulled back to expose slightly-crooked (but not _bad_ looking, Tera quickly admonished herself, just Shawn-ish) teeth, the young man shut his eyes and chuckled huskily. He hooked his thumbs in his pockets. "Plasma grenade. Plasma...they love their explanations, don't they? Here, come on."

He suddenly took her by the hand—_by the hand!_—and cocked his head at her with an almost childish expression when she froze. With great effort she squashed down the rising mess of confused emotions and stood to follow him. His face held only excitement, nothing else. They left Room 10 and he let go once he reached the top of the stairs, courteously moving aside to let her trot down ahead of him. Tera liked the way it felt to have him literally shadowing her, lean black shade-smudge cast far ahead of her by the acrid glow of the lamp at the top of the stairs.

The bike lot spread out for infinity in the dark, punctuated by the occasional vertical slash of a darkened lamp. Somewhere on the road a car went by, and the reflective paint on the asphalt caught whatever meager glow its lights threw out, flinging streaks of mercury white across the ground. Out here the sky was actually dark and only the edges of the horizon had gone murky grey-yellow from light pollution, so if Tera looked straight up she could stare up a blank kaleidoscope until she began to make out faint pinpricks that might have been satellites. "Whoa."

Watching satellites could be pretty romantic. Maybe he wasn't just enthusiastic about whatever he'd wanted to show her. Maybe he...ok, she seriously had to stop. She had had a crush on a phantom of a nameless Gladiator, not on Shawn himself. Lingering on that would not help her. Shawn was his own man, not an amorphous ghost so easily manipulated into something she should pretend she...

"There's part of Lyra," Shawn said suddenly, interrupting her train of thought as he pointed at something she couldn't see. "Vega, I think. Get a good look; it'll be too bright to see in a moment. With an unobtrusive little step away from him, she wrapped her arms around herself and squinted up. She'd never seen an actual star before; usually nights in hyper-developed central Texas were too bright, but out here in ski-country Arizona...

Then everything went bright, and when she whipped around, mouth open to form the beginning of a startled question, she found that Shawn's hands were on fire.

She slammed her palms over her eyes too late, and shimmering gold-rimmed turquoise blobs burst beyond her eyes. "Ow," she said, for lack of anything more appropriate. What the _hell_.

_Not a plasma grenade_, said a string of quickly-connected dots in her mind. _Not a plasma grenade.__  
_

"You turned around too early. I was going to warn you first." Shawn admonished her, matter-of-factly, like he'd been wrapping Christmas gifts and she'd walked into the room before he was done. "Here, I've got it dimmer now."

She cracked one eye open-it still was a little flashy-to fill her vision with the Gladiator in a broad stance, blue globules of viscous fire rippling around his forearms.

It was the most badass thing Tera had ever seen. It was, in some way, also the most terrifying. She'd never understood superhero movies, how the hero's girlfriend would be terrified by his identity, until now. She'd always expected that, if she were to someday find a boy who'd consent to kind of hanging out with her in a date-like manner, and were he to reveal himself as being the bearer of mystical powers, she would find it the most badass and/or sexiest thing ever and be the proudest girl in the world.

Except that Shawn was not her boy. There was nothing to be proud of, especially not the sudden sinking feeling that confirmed the fact that yes, she was an incredibly normal and slightly overweight. Yes, he, previously a _mostly _normal (That's sort of in the same category as 'incredibly normal', right? Right?) monster-fighting hottie, was now an incredibly not-normal monster-fighting hottie who, on top of his hotness, apparently had superpowers.

And yes, he was totally out of her league.

Tera found it a little hard to breathe, but that might just have been the sulfurous heat rolling over her.

The fire slurped back into Shawn's skin, tinting his veins an angry blue until he made a harsh gesture at the ground nearby and it was engulfed in vicious molten energy. _Dimmer, my ass! _She thought angrily as she was blinded, again. At least clapping hands over her eyes let her focus on not tearing up.

A funny hum, like an old television left on with no reception, buzzed at lowest register and prickled familiar in Tera's mind. She took as deep a breath as she could, pulled her hands down her face, and saw that Shawn was suddenly behind her. Two more hums and he was gone, and then about fifteen feet upside down above her. Tera simply watched, lost for words, as he drifted leisurely past while grinning like that disturbing fairy-tale cat whose name she could never remember.

This wasn't how superhero stories went. The hero was supposed to keep his powers hidden, let nobody in on his secret, maintain a secret identity. Or maybe he was trusting her to keep the secret for him. Breathing got a little easier. Hesitantly, she called, "You can _fly _too?"

"Sure!" he shouted, undignified as his very dirty shirt fell down around his chin and he pulled it back down...up?...with one hand. The motion didn't make him spin at all in reaction. Somewhere, a physics professor began weeping in the middle of teaching a 9th-grade class about Newton's Third Law. "Well," Shawn ammended, "more like levitate. But how do you think I kept you from killing yourself when you grabbed that loose bush and fell?"

Oh. Huh. Very Spider-Man of him. Did that make her Mary Jane? Oh god this was _so confusing_.

"Well, thanks! Like, a lot!" She thanked him. It was stilted. He didn't seem to mind.

"I'm effing Superman!" roared Shawn, zipping over her head and set a lamp-post on fire.

Was that property damage? Whatever it was, it was _awesome_. Tera cracked a smile in spite of herself, and yelled out, "Superman isn't a raging pyro!"

"Want a lift?" He stopped for a moment and hung, suspended. He didn't bob in midair like TV shows always made out people to levitate. He just was stopped, like gravity or force or natural laws had no hold on him at all. But a lift, to fly with him? Or even just float? No. A panic rose in Tera's chest. She couldn't deny any longer that she was attracted to him, but she had no experience with the actually mechanics of dating. Or flirting, for that matter. Was this flirting, or was he just excited to show off what he could do? Wait, wasn't that was guys did to impress girls, show off? But what did flying constitute? Half of what base (and, for that matter, was it even in the ballpark)? What if she got all awkward and _no_. No flying.

Well, not yet at least.

"Uh, people are probably going to hear us." Oh no, that sounded like an innuendo! Backpedal! Backpedal! "Out here. Yelling! Like idiots! Well, mostly me yelling like an idiot..." She trailed off as he stared at her quizzically. "Never, uh, mind."

"It's a good point!" Shawn shouted back. "But I can be invisible too."

And then, with all the horrible finality of a fun time ruined, Kruger's raspy squawk cut in. "That won't stop the noise _or _the mess you're making. The boss wants to talk now." He stood by the melting lamp post, arms crossed like his elbows could split the air molecules in front of him. "And bring her, since you feel like being such an exhibitionist and showing off." The eerie flickers of firelight made his beaky face even sharper and more unnatural in the unsteady gloom.

Shawn dropped lightly to the ground in front of the smaller man and interrupted, "Look, it's not like anyone else would have seen. I'm just letting off some steam. It didn't go so well back in the Arena. The whole plan went sideways."

"Yeah, Cass already told me about it all. We were gonna wait until tomorrow, but after _that_," Kruger crooked his head pointedly towards one of the slowly extinguishing patches of flaming asphalt, "we're talking now." His deep-set eyes vanished into black-shadowed crevasses in the dark when he turned, obviously wanting them to follow.

Shawn's firm grip on his shoulder stopped him. "Look, what's wrong with you? I'd have thought you'd mellowed out a little in the last, what, eleven months, thirteen?"

Kruger cast a sideways glance at Tera and made a half-hearted attempt at moving away. He grunted, "This isn't the time. Let's go." Shawn pulled his arm back with a 'hrmm' noise that said the topic was not closed.

So they went.

After trudging in sweltering silence across the lot, the three were met in the main building by Cassandra, who wordlessly ushered them down the same entryway the whole group of refugees had crowded earlier. She led them into a sparsely-furnished room that looked to be a hotel parlor with most of its furniture and decorations removed, or maybe halfway through the process of remodeling, since Tera nearly tripped on a trio of covered paint cans on her way in. It certainly smelled like paint, coupled with what might have been new carpet-foam. Next to a dusty dark-wood side table (paired with a green armchair whose pallor contrasted with it unfavorably) was a wheelchair.

In the wheelchair sat a very small person, swathed almost entirely in clothing and grossly misshapen. Tera, trained since infancy in the grand social art of not staring at people, inspected the armchair while ruthlessly investigating the figure with her peripheral vision.

It hardly exceeded three feet in height, but what made her stomach unsettled was that its legs _bent the wrong way. _Nothing in the motions of its hands...its _paws_...said it was human. It glowered at Shawn and spoke. "You're the one, then," it growled, reedy and female, critical and harsh. "The resemblance to Date is uncanny. Given that _firework_ show earlier, I would have thought you'd take more after your mom." It cocked its head a little and inspected him more closely. "Well, maybe you did. You've got an actual chin."

Shawn rearranged his stance into a mirror of Kruger's assertive one, and cut off the creature before she could continue. "Well, hello to you too. I go by Shawn. Can I ask who you are?"

When it removed its veil, the creature's face bristled with dusty cream-toned fur—almost the color of Mick's coat, Tera noticed—set around piercing liquid animal eyes. "Sure you can. I'm Sue Sakamoto," she snapped. "But the real important question right now, Shinji Fuyuhiko, is of whether or not I kill you."

* * *

**Word Count: 9195. **Hell yeah. Too bad the reason it's so long is because it's so damn slow. I had to set up a whole pile of new plot threads in this chapter, and while I could have split it in two, that would have meant I'd update on time, and we can't have Mix doing that, can we now?

This chapter is for **I'll eat yourself**, who wouldn't stop bugging me about it. Sorry I missed your birthday, man. The update may be two months late, but at least it's here, right? Too bad I didn't get it out yesterday; could have coincided with Duke Nukem Forever's UK launch.

Review or whatever. I'm going to finish this thing, no matter how long it takes. Also, _**THE FIRST CHAPTER HAS BEEN REWRITTEN**_. Rewrites of the next couple of chapters (probably up through 4; after that I don't cringe when I read it) should go up in matter of weeks. Per **I'll eat yourself's** request the originals are being preserved at my Fictionpress, where I am also known as Fusionmix. Just plug 'Fictionpress Fusionmix' into Google and I should pop up.

Next chapter starts the real fun. Exposition over. Thank you for your patience so far.


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